1969 Topps #135 Tommy Davis
About Tommy Davis
Card #135 is a series-2 issue and the only Topps card showing Davis as a Seattle Pilot, after the expansion club took him in the October 1968 draft. The back reports a grim year in Chicago: .268 with 122 hits, only 16 of them for extra bases, and 50 RBI to share the club lead on a 67-95 ninth-place team. In Seattle he led the Pilots in RBI with 80, then closed 1969 in Houston.
Herman Thomas Davis Jr. was born March 21, 1939, in Brooklyn and signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers for a $4,000 bonus after a personal phone call from Jackie Robinson steered him away from the Yankees. He won minor-league batting titles at Kokomo in 1957 and Spokane in 1959, then struck out as a pinch hitter in his only September 1959 at-bat. He became the first Los Angeles Dodger to win a batting championship, taking the National League crown in 1962 at .346 with 230 hits and a franchise-record 153 RBI that broke Roy Campanella's 142, then repeating in 1963 at .326 for the only back-to-back pair in the club's Los Angeles history. A broken and dislocated ankle on May 1, 1965, took his power but not his bat, and he kept hitting for ten organizations across eighteen seasons, among them the one-year Seattle Pilots. The designated hitter rule revived him in Baltimore, where he batted .306 in 1973 and collected 181 hits in 1974 to win that season's Outstanding Designated Hitter Award. He finished with 2,121 hits and a .294 average in 1,999 games, then worked as a Dodgers minor-league instructor and as the Seattle Mariners' hitting coach in 1981. He died April 3, 2022, in Phoenix at 83.
Sources: Wikipedia · SABR BioProject · Baseball-Reference · National Baseball Hall of Fame · Baseball Almanac (1) · Baseball Almanac (2) · Baseball Almanac (3) · Baseball Almanac (4)
Graded population (PSA & SGC)
| Grader | Total | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 1-4 | Auth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PSA | 291 | 3 | 33 | 148 | 66 | 28 | 9 | 4 | 0 |
| SGC | 8 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 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.
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Related cards
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- #178 Ray Oyler
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- #254 Joe Schultz
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- #301 Darrell Brandon
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Frequently asked questions
What is the 1969 Topps #135 card?
It is card #135 of the 664-card 1969 Topps Baseball set, picturing Tommy Davis of the Seattle Pilots.
How many cards are in the 1969 Topps Baseball set?
664 cards, tracked as 696 collectible states. Numbers run from 1 to 664 with none skipped and no printed number shared by two cards; 32 cards carry catalogued print variations that the master set counts separately, 23 of them the yellow- and white-letter name pairs of #440-511.
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 2026-10-12.