1966 Topps #302 Ernie Bowman
About Ernie Bowman
Card #302 pictures Bowman as a New York Met, a fourth-series card. He never played a major league game for the Mets. Acquired in a September 1965 trade, he was sent to their Jacksonville farm club in the spring and stayed there, opening with thirty straight hitless at-bats into late May. The glove kept him in the lineup anyway, 128 games, more than all but one teammate, and he finished at .205 with four home runs and 30 runs batted in. He helped turn the first triple play in that Jacksonville club's five-year history on June 8. It was that summer he told a 21-year-old teammate named Tom Seaver that a fastball is no good to anybody saved up for Christmas.
Ernest Ferrell Bowman was born July 28, 1935, in Johnson City, Tennessee, the second son of a father who worked in flour mills and hosiery factories and who chose the middle name to honor the ballplaying Ferrell brothers. Ernie went by Ferrell himself into his early twenties. A star at Science Hill High School in basketball, track and baseball, he took a basketball scholarship at East Tennessee State, and when the coach there kept him off the diamond he played semipro ball across the line in Abingdon, Virginia, where the scouts found him. He signed with the New York Giants in 1956. A right-handed infielder with tremendous range and a strong throwing arm, Bowman called defense his specialty, and the glove is what carried him: 165 games for the San Francisco Giants between 1961 and 1963, a .190 average, one home run and ten runs batted in. Six more minor league seasons followed before he retired in 1969. Back home he refereed basketball, worked as an assistant golf pro and spent decades in the Johnson City parks department. He entered the Northeast Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame in 1993 and died August 4, 2019.
Sources: Wikipedia · SABR BioProject · Baseball-Reference
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 152 | 0 | 16 | 77 | 30 | 15 | 7 | 7 | 0 |
| SGC | 3 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Graded population — a scarcity guide, not a price. Data as of 2026-09-04. Half grades fold down for both graders (8.5→8); PSA qualified slabs (OC, ST, PD, MC and the like) are not counted. Where SGC registers no separate row for a variation state, its slabs of that card are listed under the base state.
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Related cards
Team card: #172 New York Mets
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- #51 Gordon Richardson
- #67 Mets 1966 Rookie Stars
- #87 Dan Napoleon
- #108 Bobby Klaus
- #124 Tug McGraw
- #154 Chuck Hiller
- #188 Al Luplow
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Frequently asked questions
What is the 1966 Topps #302 card?
It is card #302 of the 598-card 1966 Topps Baseball set, picturing Ernie Bowman of the New York Mets.
How many cards are in the 1966 Topps Baseball set?
598 cards, tracked as 613 collectible states. Numbers run from 1 to 598 with no gaps and no number used twice, and 14 cards carry catalogued print variations - five checklists, the trade and sold statement backs, the three-state #43 Don Landrum, three team-card dot pairs and the #161 Jerry Lumpe white streak - that the master set counts separately.
Sources: Trading Card Database, PSA CardFacts, Cardboard Connection, Baseball Almanac, Baseball-Reference, the SABR BioProject and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, PSA & SGC population reports. Card data compiled and maintained by T206Cards.com. Page last updated 2026-10-11.