Rare T206 Honus Wagner Baseball Card Could Fetch $5M-$7M at Auction

A rare T206 Honus Wagner baseball card is going to auction next month and could set a new record with an eye-popping sale.

Per The Athletic's Brooks Peck, Goldin Auctions founder and CEO Ken Goldin, whose company is handling the sale, estimated that a T206 Wagner card consigned by the Shields family "will sell for $5 million to $7 million." Peck noted that the auction record for a T206 Wagner is $6.6 million in 2021, while the highest overall price is $7.25 million in a private sale brokered by Goldin in 2022.

The card being put up for auction was held by the same family for 116 years. Dennis and Douglas Shields are the grandsons of Morton Bernstein, the owner of a silver manufacturing plant who started collecting trading cards in the early 1900s.

"My brother and I have held onto these for years," Dennis Shields said. "It isn't for monetary issue; but it was the sentimental value that our grandfather held onto these things all his life, and we held onto them just because we love him."

Goldin called the card owned by the Shields family "the biggest discovery in the hobby in the past 50 years" because of the rarity of a publicly unaccounted for T206 Wagner.

"I've never been able to trace a Wagner that has stayed in only one family since the day the card came out," Goldin said. "The Shields' care and respect for their grandfather's collection — carefully looked after behind closed doors for 116 years — has preserved one of the hobby's true grails, and the importance of this cannot be overstated."

The auction for the Shields' Wagner card will open on Jan. 21 with a starting bid of $1 million. Goldin noted that some of the proceeds from the sale will be donated to the nonprofit Happy Trails for Kids, which provides transformative outdoor experiences for children in foster care.