1968 Topps #494 Ray Sadecki
About Ray Sadecki
A hard-luck year hides behind this card. Sadecki threw two shutouts among his first four starts and posted a 0.25 ERA in April, then spent the summer getting almost nothing behind him - the Giants scored one run or none in 16 of his 36 starts. He wound up 12-18 with a 2.91 ERA, career highs of 254 innings, six shutouts and 206 strikeouts, and 18 losses that tied Claude Osteen for the most in the majors and stood as the most by a Giants pitcher since the club moved to San Francisco. Only his 2.78 mark the year before was a better ERA.
Ray Sadecki, a left-handed pitcher born December 26, 1940, in Kansas City, Kansas, signed with the St. Louis Cardinals as a bonus baby out of Bishop Ward High School in 1958, still only seventeen, and reached the majors at nineteen in 1960. Over an 18-year career he pitched for the Cardinals, the San Francisco Giants and the New York Mets, with later stops for the Braves, Royals and Brewers, going 135-131 with a 3.78 ERA, 20 shutouts and 1,614 strikeouts in 563 games, 328 of them starts. Known for his palmball, he was the left-handed complement to Bob Gibson in St. Louis; his signature season came in 1964, when he won 20 games and beat Whitey Ford in Game One of the World Series as the Cardinals took the pennant and the title. He was traded to San Francisco in May 1966 in the deal that sent Orlando Cepeda to St. Louis, and posted his best full-season ERA, 2.78, for the Giants in 1967. Sadecki was inducted into the National Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame in 2007 and the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2010. He died November 17, 2014, in Mesa, Arizona.
Sources: Wikipedia · SABR BioProject · Baseball-Reference · Baseball Almanac
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 266 | 5 | 86 | 133 | 27 | 8 | 3 | 4 | 0 |
| SGC | 16 | 0 | 7 | 6 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 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. Slabs of the yellow team-letter #49 and #66 are 1968 Milton Bradley game cards and are not counted here.
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Related cards
More San Francisco Giants cards:
- #5 National League 1967 Home Run Leaders
- #9 National League 1967 Pitching Leaders
- #11 National League 1967 Strikeout Leaders
- #32 Joe Gibbon
- #50 Willie Mays
- #73 Jim Hart
- #85 Gaylord Perry
- #104 Dick Dietz
- #126 Bobby Etheridge
- #147 Frank Linzy
- #169 Bob Bolin
- #185 Tom Haller
- #205 Juan Marichal
- #223 Ollie Brown
Frequently asked questions
What is the 1968 Topps #494 card?
It is card #494 of the 598-card 1968 Topps Baseball set, picturing Ray Sadecki of the San Francisco Giants.
Is 1968 Topps #494 a scarce card?
It is from the sixth print series (cards 458-533). Together with series 7 it forms the #458-598 block that hobby sources price at a modest premium; several catalogs call these cards high numbers outright.
How many cards are in the 1968 Topps Baseball set?
598 cards, tracked as 606 collectible states. The numbers run from 1 to 598 without a gap and no printed number carries two different cards; eight cards - six of the seven checklists, #10 AL Pitching Leaders and #400 Mike McCormick - carry a catalogued print variation that the master set counts separately.
Sources: Trading Card Database, PSA CardFacts, Cardboard Connection, BaseballCardPedia, Baseball Almanac, Beckett, 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 2026-10-12.