One of the most famous baseball cards in the world, and yet, one of the most mysterious ones, too. The T206 Honus Wagner is considered one of the greatest cards ever, and its legend crossed over into other sports, too, when NHL superstar Wayne Gretzky bought one of the few known copies. We’re going to try to pare the whole story down for you, so you know what the T206 Honus Wagner card is all about.

Let’s first dig into each of the components of this legend separately for some backstory.

via the Baseball Hall of Fame

Honus Wagner: The Player

Wagner was born in Pennsylvania to German immigrant parents, which is weird already, considering his nickname is “The Flying Dutchman.” It appears he wasn’t Dutch -- and he couldn’t fly!

Wagner signed his first professional baseball contract with the Louisville Colonels in 1897, and he’d go on to play in Major League Baseball for 21 Hall-of-Fame seasons, 18 of which came with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He played several positions in his career, including shortstop, first base, second base, third base, and the outfield.

How important of a player was Wagner? He was one of the first five inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936, along with Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson.

T206: The Card

Jefferson Burdick, one of the greatest card-collecting minds ever, is responsible for naming this set T206, when he created the American Card Catalog back in 1939.

This set was produced between 1909 and 1911, by the American Tobacco Company.

The “T” in T206 stands for 20th-century tobacco company. The “206” is just part of Burdick’s numbering system for those types of cards. It doesn’t stand for a particular year or anything.

T206 Honus Wagner

Most experts believe there are less than 100 copies of the T206 Honus Wagner card. There are a couple theories as to why there aren’t many of these cards in population (PSA shows just 32 in their T206 pop report), so let’s discuss them!

Wagner: The Good Guy: Some believe Wagner didn’t want his image on a card promoting cigarettes because he knew it would influence children into starting this harmful vice.

Wagner: The Greedy Guy: Some believe Wagner wanted more cash for having his images used, since he was one of the stars at that time.

via AZ Central

The Legend of the Gretzky T206 Honus Wagner

The card’s scarcity made it a sought-after piece of investable art, with the face of “The Flying Dutchman” on it. After joining the Los Angeles Kings in a trade near the late ‘80s, Gretzky joined forces with Kings owner Bruce McNall to buy a beautiful copy of this card in 1991 for $451,000.

This copy ended up being the very first card PSA ever graded, noted as much by the serial number 00000001.

Interestingly, the card was discovered to be trimmed, and it still got a grade of PSA 8. Let’s chalk that up to PSA’s youth. They’d label it as “Authentic” these days.

Gretzky buying this specific card immediately gave it more cache.

Walmart then bought the Gretzky T206 Honus Wagner for $500,000 in 1995, and the superstore gave the card away as part of a promotion. It was won by a Florida postal worker! DO NOT BEND!

In 1996, that postal worker sold it for $640,000 at the Christie’s auction house.

After several more sales, it finally landed in the hands of Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendricks in 2007, for a cool $2.8 million. And it hasn’t been sold since.

This T206 set is considered one of the most important sets in sports card history, and this card ranks among the most iconic in the world.

A 1909 Sweet Caporal T206 Honus Wagner SGC 3 sold for $6.06 million, only to be outdone by an SGC 2 version of that card in 2022, which sold for $7.25 million.

In another interesting twist, if Gretzky had bought a perfect copy of his own rookie card and held onto it until today, he could have sold it for several times more than what he got for the T206 Honus Wagner. That PSA 10 Gretzky sold for 3.75 million in 2021!