1966 Topps #434 Willie Kirkland
About Willie Kirkland
Card 434 comes from the fifth series of Topps' 1966 set, issued for what proved to be Kirkland's last major-league season. Washington used him as a spare outfielder and a bat off the bench: 124 games but only 163 at-bats, with 58 pinch-hitting and 16 pinch-running appearances and just 68 games in the field, 50 of them in left. He hit .190 with six home runs and 17 RBI, and he played his final big-league game on September 26, 1966. The Senators released him that October 18, closing a nine-year run in the majors.
Willie Charles Kirkland, nicknamed Boom Boom, was born February 17, 1934, in Siluria, Alabama, and raised in Detroit. A right fielder and a powerful left-handed hitter, he signed with the New York Giants out of Northwestern High School and piled up home runs in the minors before losing all of 1957 to military service. He broke in with the transplanted San Francisco Giants in 1958, batting cleanup behind Willie Mays in the club's first official West Coast game and collecting a single and an RBI in an 8-0 win over the Dodgers at Seals Stadium on April 15. He held the Giants' regular right-field job through 1960, and then a trade sent him to Cleveland, where he had his best big-league season in 1961. Over nine major-league seasons with the Giants, Indians, Orioles and Senators he batted .240 with 837 hits, 148 home runs and 509 RBI in 1,149 games. His playing days ran longer than that: after a 34-homer year for the Pacific Coast League's Hawaii Islanders in 1967, he spent six seasons with Japan's Hanshin Tigers, adding 126 more home runs across a 20-year professional career.
Sources: Wikipedia · Baseball-Reference · Baseball Almanac · Retrosheet
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 247 | 2 | 37 | 129 | 56 | 14 | 8 | 1 | 0 |
| SGC | 6 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
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: #194 Washington Senators
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- #11 Senators 1966 Rookie Stars
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- #46 Howie Koplitz
- #69 Ken Hamlin
- #77 Johnny Orsino
- #95 Pete Richert
- #118 Mike McCormick
- #149 Dick Nen
- #165 Don Lock
- #211 Frank Kreutzer
- #251 Ed Brinkman
- #274 Buster Narum
- #294 Steve Ridzik
- #312 Bob Saverine
Frequently asked questions
What is the 1966 Topps #434 card?
It is card #434 of the 598-card 1966 Topps Baseball set, picturing Willie Kirkland of the Washington Senators.
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.