'Holy Grail' baseball card of Pirates legend Honus Wagner fetches record $6.6M

A 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card has sold for more than $6.6 million, according to Robert Edward Auctions based in New Jersey.

The price shattered a previous record of $5.2 million that was paid for a sports card — 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card and the 2003-04 Upper Deck Exquisite Collection autographed rookie jersey card of LeBron James, ESPN reported. The auction closed early Monday for the rare T206 card of the Pittsburgh Pirates great.

Bidding started at $1 million on July 23 and rose to $2.8 million that day. Several other bids through late July bumped the price up to $4 million, but it wasn’t until late last week and during the weekend that the bids started streaming back in, according to the auction site.

The card originally was discovered on Long Island in the 1970s and changed hands several times in the years since. It was sold at public auction in 2012 for $1.23 million, according to the auction site.

On the back of the card sold Monday is an advertisement for Sweet Caporal Cigarettes.

Only about 50 Wagner cards from the T206 collection — a set of more than 500 cards released from 1909-11 by the American Tobacco Co. — are known to exist. Wagner’s is considered the rarest among the set because he demanded the company stop using his likeness to market tobacco to children, according to his family. The Wagner T206 card has come to be known as “The Holy Grail,” “Mona Lisa” or simply “The Card.” ESPN examined its popularity, deeming it the greatest sports card of all time.

A Wagner card sold for more than $1.4 million in 2020, a record at the time for that specific type of card, the Associated Press reported.

Johannes Peter ‘Honus’ Wagner was a Carnegie native who played major league baseball for 21 seasons, from 1897 to 1917. Wagner was with the Pirates for all but the first three of those seasons.

The shortstop won eight batting titles and batted .300 or better for 17 consecutive seasons. He played in nearly 2,800 games, had 10,450 at-bats, recorded 3,430 hits and amassed a .328 lifetime average. He had 651 doubles, 252 triples and 722 stolen bases.

Wagner is widely regarded as one of baseball’s greatest players. He was one of five players inducted into the Hall of Fame in its inaugural class of 1936. He died in 1955.