Historic Honus Wagner Card Sells for $5.1M at Auction After 'Biggest Discovery' in 50 Years

The legendary 1909 Sweet Caporal T206 Honus Wagner card sold for its third-highest price in history Saturday when it was purchased for $5.124 million through Goldin Auctions.

Wagner's T206 card is one of the rarest and most valuable collectibles in the world, and its consistent sale prices reflect that.

According to Larry Holder of The Athletic, the Card Ladder database shows that T206 Wagner cards have sold 16 times since 2015, and all of them have gone for at least $1 million.

The latest sale, which was for a PSA-graded 1 T206 Wagner, is No. 3 on the all-time list behind an SGC-graded 2 that went for $7.25 million in 2022 and an SGC-graded 3 that sold for $6.61 million in 2021.

Per Holder, Goldin Auctions founder Ken Goldin said in December that the newly sold Wagner card was "the biggest discovery in the hobby in the past 50 years."

Goldin's reasoning for that declaration is the fact that it has always been in the possession of the same family until now.

"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 [Shieldses'] 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."

Holder noted that Morton Bernstein pulled the Wagner card from a cigarette pack in the early 1900s and passed it down to his grandsons, Dennis and Douglas Shields, as part of a framed collection.

The T206 Wagner card is among the most scarce cards ever produced since Wagner asked the American Tobacco Company to stop producing the card in 1909, per Holder.

As a result, there are only 53 T206 Wagner cards known to be in existence and graded by either PSA or SGC.

The card's value is aided by the fact that Wagner was one of the greatest shortstops in baseball history.

Over 21 seasons with the National League's Louisville Colonels and Pittsburgh Pirates from 1897 to 1917, Wagner batted .328 with 3,420 hits, 1,739 runs scored, 101 home runs, 1,732 RBI and 723 stolen bases.

Wagner was an eight-time batting champion and one-time World Series champion, and he was part of the inaugural class of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936.