You may have read recently that the famous 1909 Honus Wagner tobacco card recently sold at auction for $2.35 million. It’s the same card that Wayne Gretzky and former L.A. Kings owner Bruce McNall bought for $451,000 in 1991 and later sold for $1.26 million in 2000. That’s better than a five-fold appreciation in about 15 years.
By way of background, the card was part of a set issued over the 1909-10 seasons by the American Tobacco Trust. The cards were inserted to stiffen packs of cigarettes ? pre-flip top box ? and were found in 16 different brands of smokes, most of which I doubt you’ve ever heard of: American Beauty, Sweet Caporal, Tolstoi, Uzit, El Principe de Gales, to name but a few. The cards are small, 1.5 x 2.5 inches, and feature a player’s picture on one side and a cigarette ad on the other.
These aren’t photographs, by the way. American Tobacco paid an artist to paint the pictures, which were then lithographed onto the paper. That’s a big part of their collectability, to be sure.
The saga of the Wagner card is legendary, if not apocryphal. As the story goes, Honus ? the greatest shortstop in history (go ahead, look up his numbers) ? didn’t want to be perceived as endorsing the use of tobacco and asked that his card be pulled from the set. More likely, he didn’t want his name or picture used without some form of compensation. Fact is, ol’ Honus was a tobacco user, and years later, his card as a Pirates’ coach actually showed him taking a dip of chew out of a pouch.
In the mid-1970s, when the sports-collecting boom was justgetting underway, a Michigan dealer ran an ad in several national magazines that pictured the Wagner card with a headline “One Baseball Card Worth $1,000?” At the time, that was big money for a small piece of cardboard. In retrospect, if any of us had known that 30-some years later it would have jumped a gazillion percent, we would’ve certainly bought one.
And many of us could have bought one. You see, the Wagner card is not rare in the sense that it’s one of a kind. Indeed, there are probably 50 or so examples out there ? maybe more ? in varying conditions. The one recently sold might be the nicest one, but I recall being shown a pair of Wagner cards by a Northern Virginia collector years ago that were in the same category; one was even a background color variation, which really could be one of a kind.
The Wagner card’s value is based largely on hype, and that’s OK. The sports-collecting hobby remains a passion for many Americans, even some reasonably well-adjusted ones. I was into it, big-time, for many years. After starting a family, however, other things took priority, and I was ? and am ? content with the stuff I hung onto, though eventually it will all end up elsewhere.
By the way, there’s another shortstop named Wagner in the same set of cards. It’s Heinie Wagner of the Boston Red Sox, but his card is worth only a tiny fraction of Honus’.
After all, Honus was nobody’s Heinie.
Phil Wood has covered sports in the Washington-Baltimore market for more than 30 years. You can reach him at [email protected].
