The most famous baseball card ever printed is the Honus Wagner T206. In mint condition — or as close to mint condition as you can get for a card that appeared in cigarette packs more than 100 years ago — it has sold for more than $3 million. There has been a book written about it, a movie made about it, there have been numerous scandals surrounding it (with one dealer going to prison).
Various Wagner cards have been owned by Wayne Gretzky and Charlie Sheen. The card has been auctioned off by nuns to raise money for their ministries.
The T206 Wagner is not the rarest of all baseball cards, though it is rare. It is certainly not the most unusual of all baseball cards — there’s a plainness about it with its orange background and an unsmiling Wagner and his wavy hair posing stiffly while wearing a collared uniform, the words “Wagner, Pittsburg” typed below.
But it is the most famous because it comes with a story, a story that goes beyond the card itself, a story that goes a bit beyond baseball itself, a story that just might (or might not) get to the heart of one of the greatest heroes to ever play the game.
Baseball cards go back more or less to the start of professional baseball. There were various cards celebrating baseball even before the 1869 Cincinnati Redlegs became the first openly professional team, but recognizable baseball cards — photographs of Major League Baseball players on cardboard that you can trade or flip or put in the spokes of your bicycle — began 10 or so years after the birth of the National League. They first appeared in packs of cigarettes. According to “The Card,” Michael O’Keeffe’s book about the T206 Honus Wagner, the first distinct baseball card was probably a 25-card set put out by the cigarette manufacturer Goodwin & Co. in 1886.
The idea, looking back, was quite brilliant. In addition to connecting tobacco to the sport that was rapidly becoming the national pastime and in addition to giving consumers an extra reason to stick with one brand of cigarettes, the baseball cards themselves helped keep the cigarette packs rigid and firm, preventing cigarette breakage. It was such a breakthrough idea that soon other cigarette companies joined in and began creating their own baseball card sets.
Yes, it seems incongruous to have baseball cards in a cigarette pack, not least because now it is illegal for anyone younger than 21 to buy one. But in those days, tobacco companies openly and unabashedly marketed cigarettes to minors. That might seem vulgar now, but it’s a good reminder of how different a time it was. Less than 40 percent of all teenagers were in school. Children were working in factories and on farms, working long hours. The Keating-Owen Child Labor Act did not pass until 1916.
When the American Tobacco Co. bought out everybody and became a monopoly — under the ferocious leadership of a man named Buck Duke, who later endowed a university that would take on his last name and go to a bunch of Final Fours — it took the baseball card business to another level. The crescendo came from 1909-11, when they put out a gigantic set of 524 baseball cards, the set now known at T206.
The set wasn’t called T206 at the time. No, that is a whole other rabbit hole, but one we must go down because it takes us all the way back to Honus Wagner. The set was classified as T206 by a fascinating, strange and utterly devoted man named Jefferson Burdick, known by many as the Father of Card Collecting.
We don’t know very much about Burdick’s life. He was born around 1900 and grew up in upstate New York, in a little town called Central Square, just outside of Syracuse. He fell in love with cards early — he once said that he and his friends would ask their fathers to change cigarette brands periodically so they could collect cards from different sets.
Burdick, however, was not a particularly big baseball fan — it is believed he never once attended a baseball game. No, he was an obsessive fan of cards — “I have an inherited love of pictures,” he said — and baseball cards just happened to be a big category in his obsession. Burdick’s definition of what made a card was pretty liberal. He collected postcards, playing cards, greeting cards, business cards, advertising cards as well as baseball cards, yes, but he also collected chewing gum wrappers, cigar wrappers, vaudeville flyers, political posters and so on.
“Some ask how anyone becomes interested in cards,” he said in one of the few interviews he ever gave. “You don’t. Collectors are born that way.”
He collected obsessively. In his lifetime, he accumulated more than 300,000 items, which he painstakingly categorized and mounted and donated to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. To say this was his life’s work would be to understate things. He walked into the museum for the last time on Jan. 10, 1963, worked a full eight hours on his cards, and then stood up and announced: “I shan’t be back.” He checked into the hospital the next day and died two months later.
Burdick is the one who named the famous set T206 with the T standing for “Tobacco.” But more to the point, he is the man who first alerted the world about the specialness of the T206 Wagner. He put out the first version of his American Card Catalog in 1933 and listed the values of the cards. Most were a nickel. Some were a dime.
But the T206 Honus Wagner card he listed as the most expensive and valuable card of them all — worth $50, about $1,000 in today’s money.
Why? Burdick had his reason. And finally, we get to our hero.
Honus Wagner was the greatest and most beloved player of his day. His full name was Johannes Peter Wagner, and during his playing days he was called Hans Wagner more often than he was called Honus. The Honus name really took hold after his playing days were over, after he had become a larger-than-life legend. I guess people thought “Honus Wagner” sounded more regal.
Bill James made the point in the New Historical Baseball Abstract that casual baseball fans (and even a few more devoted ones) sometimes confuse Rogers Hornsby and Honus Wagner. It’s a bizarre thing but I think he’s right. Maybe it’s because both of them were right-handed middle infielders who won a lot of batting titles. Your Baseball 100 editor Kaci Borowski points out they both have perfect old-timey baseball names.
But the comparison could not be more inapt. They were, in all ways that mattered, polar opposites. Hornsby was the worst in just about every way — a racist, a bully, a rogue, a terrible teammate, a defensive liability, a selfish son of a gun — while Wagner was friendly, admirable, openhearted, brilliant defensively and beloved.
Wagner was the best defensive player of his day. From Ogden Nash’s famous “Line-Up For Yesterday”
W is for Wagner
The bowlegged beauty
Short was closed to all traffic
With Honus on duty.
Wagner was, despite his famous bowed legs, breathtakingly fast, and he led the league in stolen bases five times and triples three more.
And he was universally admired. Don’t misunderstand: Wagner was not exactly a sweetheart. He could drink with the best of them, and he was a furious competitor. He jawed at umpires — once he was charged with throwing a ball wildly on purpose to hit an umpire. He vehemently denied it but was still suspended for three days.
One Wagner story, probably apocryphal but certainly indicative of Wagner’s relentlessness, goes that Ty Cobb once insulted his German heritage, and Wagner responded by slamming down a tag so hard on Cobb’s face that it almost knocked out his teeth. Baseball was a tough game and Wagner — who was a sturdy 5-foot-11, 200 pounds and came from Pennsylvania coal country — was as tough as he needed to be.
But he treated people with grace and respect. When told that people were calling a Negro Leagues star, Pop Lloyd, “The Black Honus Wagner,” he responded: “It is a privilege to have been compared with him.”
And he was smart. So smart. “I never saw Honus make a mental mistake, and I never heard of a person who saw him make one,” Wagner’s longtime teammate and, later, Hall of Fame manager Bill McKechnie said.
Burleigh Grimes told a great story of seeing an older Wagner facing a rookie pitcher. Wagner was a great old player. He hit an astonishing 20 triples at age 38 and 17 triples at age 41. The story goes that near the end, Wagner faced a rookie pitcher with a terrific curveball. The kid threw that curve and Wagner swung and missed so hard that he fell to his knees.
“Watch this,” Grimes said to a teammate. The pitcher, no doubt filled with boldness after making the legend look silly, threw the curve again. Wagner drilled the ball off the wall so hard that Grimes said the wall shook for five minutes. Five minutes..
Wagner truly had no weaknesses. He won eight batting titles and led the league multiple times in every major category except home runs, which wasn’t really a significant part of baseball in his day. There is a good argument to make that the Gold Glove should be named for him, that’s how revolutionary his defense was (he cut a hole in his glove so he could get the ball out more quickly on the exchange). He was a great bunter, a great handler of the bat — using a batting style where his hands were a few inches apart and a bat roughly the size of a telephone pole — and, as mentioned, an aggressive and spectacular base runner.
It should be added here — for the purposes of our story — that Wagner was also one of the great negotiators of his day. He “retired” several times in his career, most significantly before the 1908 season. He was just 34 then and coming off a typically great season when he led the National League in batting average, doubles, stolen bases, on-base percentage, slugging percentage and total bases. But he said he was through. His body was too beat up to keep going.
It became a daily story. Soon there were rumors about why he was REALLY quitting, the big one being that he was sick of the way fans (particularly gamblers) in the crowd booed him and gave him a hard time for not getting a hit every time up. He talked about going into show business — starting a circus, was the way he described his plans. The Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss pleaded with him to come back. So did the president of the National League, who said professional baseball would collapse without him.
And in the end, yes, Wagner returned and had perhaps his greatest season in 1908, finishing two home runs shy of the Triple Crown.
But in the years since, it has become canon that the whole thing was a negotiation. Wagner denied it ferociously (“There was no financial trouble or any other misunderstanding between the club and myself,” he said), but it’s pretty meaningful that he doubled his salary. It was not the only time Wagner played hardball.
This too is part of the T206 Wagner story.
In 1909, Wagner was far and away the most famous and beloved baseball player in America. As such, when the American Tobacco Co. decided to put together its baseball card set, he was the most important player to secure. It’s unclear how the ATC negotiated with players for photo rights. In most cases, they probably didn’t. A few players might have gotten a nominal fee, but most probably got nothing at all.
Wagner, though, was in a different category entirely, so much so that the ATC paid $10 to Pittsburgh’s most-read and influential sportswriter, John Gruber, to secure Wagner’s permission. Ten dollars was not insubstantial in 1909. It was a weekly salary for most families.
Gruber did not get Wagner’s permission. He did, however, get the most celebrated letter in baseball card collecting history.
Dear John,
I don’t want my picture in cigarets, but I don’t want you to lose the $10, so I’m enclosing my check for that sum.
Hans Wagner
Gruber never cashed the check. He framed it and kept it on his wall for the rest of his life.
The ATC had already printed some Wagner cards — estimates range from 50 to 200 cards. But after getting word from Gruber, they immediately stopped. That’s why Jefferson Burdick priced the card so high. In 1955, he said, “Only three or four copies have been found.”
To give you an idea of the rarity, baseball card historian Scot A. Reader estimates that there were 370 million T206 cards printed from 1909 to 1911. That would be about 700,000 copies per card. With so few Wagners out there, you can understand how rare it is.
But it should be added: The Wagner is not the rarest of the T206 cards. No, a mediocre pitcher named Slow Joe Doyle — called that because apparently he took FOREVER between pitches — was mistakenly put on the New York Giants instead of the New York Highlanders in an early version of his card. It’s believed the company caught the error after only one or two dozen got out.
It isn’t just the rarity of the Wagner that sets it apart. It’s the story. Why did Wagner refuse to be a part of the T206 set?
“It is because Wagner was a nonsmoker,” Burdick said, “who wouldn’t allow a picture on a cigarette card, as it would imply his approval of smoking.”
Yes. That’s the story that emerged: Wagner had refused to have his photo placed on a cigarette card because he did not want to play any role in encouraging kids to buy cigarettes. He loved kids; he was famous for going through the outside clubhouse entrance down the right-field line of Exposition Park and holding the door open just long enough for a few kids to get in and see the game.
So the Wagner card came to represent the moral principles of the great Honus Wagner.
But is the story true? Well, that’s an interesting question. Several people — including collector and baseball historian Keith Olbermann — have looked deeply into it and said it probably isn’t true. There are a couple of reasons to doubt. One, Wagner was a tobacco user. He chewed tobacco on and off the field. His granddaughter Leslie Blair recalled him always having a mouth full of chew. And he loved few things more than he loved a cigar. He was so devoted to cigars that he had appeared on a cigar trading card and on multiple occasions let his photo appear on the box cover of a particularly favored brand of cigars.
Two, well, we already told you: Wagner fought for his money. It seems every bit as likely as any other theory that he turned down the ATC offer because it was too low.
But, you know what? In this case, I would go with the romantic version of the story. We can never be sure, but the money thing seems less convincing because Wagner gave his friend Gruber a $10 check, suggesting that he felt bad about letting his friend down. If it had been a situation in which he felt like the company was trying to take advantage of him financially, would he really have given that check?
Second, we do know that he really WAS worried about children using tobacco. How do we know that? Well, in 1914, a short but wonderful letter from Wagner appeared in the Pittsburgh Press. It was filled with advice for a friend who was giving a talk to boys. The letter was headlined “Wagner’s Advice To Boy friends.”
“I don’t think you could use a better line of talk,” Wagner wrote, “than to tell a boy not to use tobacco and to let drink and lies alone; keep good hours, take plenty of exercise and not over-exert. And when a boy sets out to do a thing he should make up his mind to do it well, for a job not completed is no job at all. Tell ’em to take the advice of their parents on all things.
Here’s one more Wagner story, one I began to tell in the Arky Vaughan essay. This time let’s tell it from the perspective of Wagner. Honus was a natural ballplayer. There doesn’t seem to be much coaching in his early life; he learned the game on his own. His most famous quote is simply: “There ain’t much to being a ballplayer if you’re a ballplayer.”
Fifteen years after Wagner retired as the greatest shortstop in the history of the game, Vaughan came along for the same team — this is like the shortstop version of the Sandy Koufax and Clayton Kershaw story for left-handed pitchers. Vaughan was immediately a great hitter. But he was an erratic shortstop. He made a lot of errors — 46 in each of his first two years. The Pirates brought Wagner in to help teach the kid a few things. “They said if I couldn’t make a shortstop out of Arky Vaughan, nobody could,” he told reporters.
Wagner did help. The two became as close as brothers; Wagner and Vaughan roomed together for the next nine years. Vaughan would later say that from Wagner, “I learned more baseball than I ever dreamed existed.”
And Wagner had a deep love for his protégé: “Vaughan is such a fine hitter and such a whirlwind on the bases. Of all the players I tried to help, he’s the best.”
But the funny part is that while Vaughan undoubtedly learned so much from Wagner by simply being around the great man, Honus was not what you might call a demonstrative or vivid teacher. Yes, Wagner worked with Vaughan for hours on the field, but when someone asked Vaughan how it was progressing, he smiled.
“I’m not sure,” Vaughan said. “When I asked Mr. Wagner what to do, he said, ‘You just run in fast, grab the ball and throw it to first base ahead of the runner.’ But he didn’t tell me how.”
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