UPDATE: The reserve of the Honus Wagner card wasn’t met, meaning that the card went unsold. Bidding ended on Saturday, June 21, at 10:30 p.m. ET.
A T206 Honus Wagner, one of the most coveted baseball cards for deep-pocketed collectors, hit the auction block Wednesday, with bidding reaching $3.17 million less than an hour after its 10 a.m. local time opening. Long the most valuable baseball card before being eclipsed by Mickey Mantle, the T206 Wagner is being offered by Goldin Auctions. The last T206 Wagner sold fetched $7.25 million in a private sale brokered by Goldin in 2022, making it one of the world’s most valuable sports collectibles.
“Most collectors fortunate enough to be able to afford these seemingly priceless heirlooms are immediately bestowed an infinite level of immense pride and prestigious entry into an exclusive ‘Collector’s Club,’” says Goldin’s breathless description of the Wagner card. “This unmatched tobacco treasure stands far above any of its inferior brethren, ultimately leading to its rightful designation as the ‘Holy Grail of all sports cards.’”
The Wagner card is famed among collectors for its scarcity, with only 54 copies known to exist, with 28 of them reflecting the PR-FR 1 grade rating from card grader PSA—meaning poor to fair condition—including the current example. While there are older baseball cards with fewer copies in existence and certainly similarly scarce cards in better condition, the Wagner has long been coveted due to its combination of scarcity and Hall of Fame subject. The Pittsburgh Pirates’ “Flying Dutchman,” Wagner was one of the first five players voted into the first baseball Hall of Fame class in 1936. The player, who retired in 1917 and died in 1955, still is in the top 10 for all-time baseball records in hits, doubles, triples and wins above replacement to this day.
The T206 card is also legendary for the stories about why it is so scarce. Though no reason has been definitively proven, the popular tale is that Wagner opposed the inclusion of his cards to sell tobacco products, feeling it helped market cigarettes to children. When he was asked to be included in the T206 series, he declined. But for reasons not known, the card producer still included the Wagner card in some – but not all – printings of the series anyway. On learning of the card, the ballplayer firmly put a stop to his inclusion, resulting in the relatively few cards in circulation.
This particular card being sold now is known as The Connecticut Wagner. In 1985, a card collector-seller father and son duo were at their table at a Connecticut card show when an elderly man walked up and offered to sell them his set of 522 of the 523-card T206 series, which he had collected with his father as a child, for $10,000. The Wagner T206 included in that collection was sold around 2000 for $282,000 and then resold for an undisclosed price to a private collector who has consigned it to Goldin today. The seller’s name is also not publicly disclosed.
“The T206 Wagner is the quintessential sports card, and its unlimited investment potential is easily justified by the lofty escalating pricing points for all grading levels,” the Goldin auction listing adds. The auction house adds that it believes a PSA 8 condition version of the T206 Wagner known to exist is worth perhaps $50 million today.
The online auction ends June 21.
