Honus Wagner Card Brings over a Million

The Honus Wagner T206 card sells on eBay for $1.1 million

The card collectors call the “Mona Lisa of Baseball Cards” changed hands again in the summer of 2000. The Honus Wagner T206 tobacco card sold on eBay for $1.1 million, plus a buyer’s premium of $165,000, for a total of $1,265,000.

The buyer was Brian Seigel, a collector from southern California. He had started collecting baseball cards at 10 or 11, given it up, and returned to the hobby in the mid-1980s. He specialized in tobacco cards, and eBay reported that he already owned “a good number of the T206 series cards.” The Wagner became the centerpiece of his collection.

The seller, Michael Gidwitz, said afterward that the money was not the most important part of the deal. Having a good time was. He had bought the same card at a Christie’s auction in 1996 for $640,000, a record at the time, and the eBay sale made him the first person to sell a baseball card for more than $1 million.

How the 2000 Honus Wagner auction worked

The listing ran for about 10 days, from July 5 to July 15, 2000. It was not open to just anyone with an eBay account. Only pre-registered buyers who had deposited $100,000 in escrow could bid, and bids had to rise in $50,000 steps.

Those rules kept casual bidders out and gave the seller some assurance that the winner could pay. On July 13, two days before the close, the high bid stood at $800,000. The final hammer price of $1.1 million came in the last stretch of the sale, and the 15 percent buyer’s premium added the remaining $165,000.

For the online auction business, the sale was a statement. A card that had previously sold in the salesroom of an old auction house had now passed through an internet listing for well over a million dollars. The way collectors buy and sell through the site is covered in more detail in the guide to selling on eBay.

From Wayne Gretzky to Brian Seigel: the card’s owners

After the sale, Gidwitz was interviewed by CBS, the BBC and many other outlets. The BBC questioned him at length about why the card was so rare and so valuable, and he traced its line of owners for British viewers.

The card had belonged to hockey star Wayne Gretzky and Bruce McNall, owner of the Los Angeles Kings. It then went to Treat Entertainment, which arranged a giveaway of the card with Wal-Mart. The winner of that promotion was Patricia Gibbs, a postal employee. From her it passed to Gidwitz, and then to Seigel.

Few collectibles of any kind, cards or otherwise, have a chain of ownership that well known. That record, called provenance in the antiques trade, is part of what makes this particular card so sought after: a buyer knows exactly which copy he is getting and where it has been.

Why the Honus Wagner card is so valuable

The T206 series was issued by the American Tobacco Company between about 1909 and 1911. The small cards were packed with cigarettes and loose tobacco, partly to stiffen the packs and partly as a premium to keep customers buying the same brand. The set covers hundreds of major and minor league players, and most of its cards were printed in large numbers.

The Wagner card is the exception. It was pulled from production early, so only a small number ever reached the public. Accounts of why differ. The most often repeated story is that Wagner objected to having his picture sold with tobacco, though some historians think the dispute was over payment. Either way, the scarcity was settled more than 90 years before the eBay sale.

The player matters too. Honus Wagner, the shortstop of the Pittsburgh Pirates, was one of the greatest hitters of his era and one of the first five men elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936. A rare card of an ordinary player would be a curiosity. A rare card of one of the game’s first legends became the most famous card in the hobby.

Michael Gidwitz and collecting baseball history

Gidwitz was more than a one-card owner. The CBS crew spent hours filming his private collection and was struck by how deep and broad it was.

“My collection records the history of baseball on uncut sheets of cards,” he said. “The crew planned to spend about two hours filming. They ended up staying an additional 2 3/4 hours filming it.”

Uncut sheets are the printed sheets of cards before they were cut into individual pieces, and few survive because most were sliced up as intended. A collection of them shows how sets were laid out and printed, something single cards cannot.

Card collecting at this level grew out of the much wider hobby of collecting baseball memorabilia, which takes in autographs, programs, bats and uniforms along with cards. For many fans the attachment is personal and tied to a team, as it was for actor Bryan Cranston and his Dodgers memorabilia.

The Wagner card had changed hands several times by 2000 and was by then the best-known card in the hobby, and nothing about its history suggested it would stay put. As the story stood after the eBay sale, the only open question was how long it would be before Honus went back on the road.