Big news in the baseball card world.
Dan Good of the New York Post reports that the famous 1909-11 T206 Honus Wagner card was sold at an auction this morning for $2.1 million. The buyer’s identity is unknown. According to Darren Rovell of ESPN, this is a new record price for a card in a public sale, topping the $1.6 million price paid for the same card back in 2008.
Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick paid $2.8 million in 2008 for a T206 Wagner -- the same card once owned by hockey great Wayne Gretzky -- but that was in a private sale.
Widely regarded as the hobby’s most coveted card, it’s believed there were only several dozen T206 Wagners in existence. The series was distributed in cigarette packs, but the Wagner cards were pulled for an unknown reason. Some say Wagner didn’t want to encourage children to smoke, but others believe that he wasn’t happy about not being paid by the card manufacturer.
Some of the other items up for bid included a signed Wagner baseball, a bat used by Derek Jeter in the 2001 World Series and a duplicate of Alex Rodriguez’s 2009 World Series ring which was put up for auction by his cousin, Yuri Sucart.
