T206 Wagner Baseball Card to be Sold

A T206 Honus Wagner card – often called the Holy Grail or Mona Lisa of sports collectibles – will be sold as part of a huge weekend multi-estate sale planned for Nov. 22-23 by Philip Weiss Auctions. Nov. 22 will be dedicated mainly to sports memorabilia.

“This will be our greatest sports sale ever,” Weiss said of the first day of the sale. “The Honus Wagner card, which we expect will bring $500,000-$800,000, comes from the family of the original owner and has never before been offered on the market. It is SGC graded 3, and that is the only thing keeping it from being worth much more.” A PSA 5 Wagner card sold this summer for $1.6 million. The highest price recorded for a Wagner is $2.8 million for a PSA 8 (near mint) copy.

The Nov. 22 auction will also feature a collection of original-owner T205 and T206 for sale, to include a highly prized Ray Demmitt error card. The Honus Wagner card was issued as part of the T206 baseball cards set (1909-1911) by the American Tobacco Company. The cards were inserted into packs of cigarettes as a promotion, but Wagner – a non-smoker – refused to allow production of his own card to continue.

As a result, a very limited number of Wagner cards were ever distributed to the public. Fewer than 100 are believed to survive today. In 1933, the card got its first assigned value ($50) in The American Card Catalog, making it the most expensive baseball card in the world at the time.

The card has become so famous that in an episode of the television series Prison Break, a thief gets five years for stealing a Honus Wagner T206 card (it was considered a felony, because of the value). Wagner is a Hall of Famer who played 21 seasons, mostly with Pittsburgh.