T206 History: Iconic 1909-1911 Baseball Card Set

The most famous and most valuable card from this, and indeed from almost all sports cards ever, is the legendary Honus Wagner card pictured above. But before we look closer at that one, let’s highlight a few things about the set as a whole.

The T206 cards was a set of 524 cards issued between 1909 and 1911 inside the tobacco products of 16 brands that were all under the umbrella of the American Tobacco Company.

The set wasn’t actually originally referred to as T206 at the time of its release, it wasn’t originally referred to as anything in particular actually, except for maybe “those cards inside cigarette packs” or something.

This T206 designation was given after the release of the 1939 book called “The United States Card Collectors Catalog”, which basically categorized all collectible cards into one sourcebook written by an avid collector and cataloger of the time named Jefferson Burdick.

The “T” was the designation given in the book for all 20th century tobacco product cards, and the 206 was just its number, used for organizational purposes, in the catalog.

Of the 524 cards in the set, about 100 of them are of minor league players of the time, while 76 of the cards feature players who became major league hall-of-famers (38 players in total, some of them are featured on more than one card. In fact, Ty Cobb alone is featured on four of the cards).

Due to the massive size of the set, it is often times called “The Monster” by set chasers, as it is quite a difficult proposition to put together the entire gargantuan monster that is T206. Add to this that each of the cards also has variations with different backs, and even defining what is a full T206 set becomes difficult to do.

The backs of these cards are actually advertisements for the 16 tobacco brands that released these cards in their products, so for most of the cards there were actually variations with 16 different backs. Most set collectors don’t even try to factor this into the equation though as it would just turn a Monster into a 16-headed Monster, which nobody wants to deal with. I mean, trying to track down like 8,000 different cards from over 110 years ago doesn’t sound like set collecting to me, that just sounds like pure insanity.

Due to the massive size of the set, it is more common for set chasers to aim to complete the subset of hall-of-fame players’ cards. And even from this, due to the extreme rarity and value of two of those cards, the Honus Wagner and the Eddie Plank, many consider a 74 card subset of hall-of-fame players from this set as a complete set in itself even without those two much rarer cards.

It is believe that less than 100 of the Eddie Plank card were ever produced, and being that this set is more than a century old, it is not surprising that it rarely pops its head up anywhere.

The Honus Wagner card as well is extremely scarce, with only 57 known to exist, the most expensive of which was an SGC 2 graded version that sold in the summer of 2022 for $7.2 million. Actually, if you look at a list of the top ten most expensive sports cards ever sold, the Honus Wagner card pops up on that list several times. It was also the first sports card to ever sell for over a million dollars, when it did so back in the year 2000.

Mini-Biography of Honus Wagner

But who exactly was Honus Wagner? And why did his card become the Holy Grail of all sports cards, when the same T206 set included quite a number of big names, such as Ty Cobb and Cy Young?

Honus Wagner was a Major League shortstop for 21 seasons, from 1897–1917, playing most of his years with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He won the batting titles eight times in his career, never batting below .330 in any of those seasons, and this batting title streak still holds to this day as an unbroken record, though it was tied by Tony Gwynn in 1997. He also led the league in slugging percentage six times and stolen bases five times. So, yeah, he was really good.

When the Baseball Hall of Fame first began, it inducted five members out of the initial 47 candidates in it’s very first ballot in 1936. Some of the players that didn’t make the Hall of Fame in that first vote included Cy Young, Lou Gehrig, Rogers Hornsby, George Sisler, Tris Speaker and many others. The five who did make the cut where Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Honus Wager. Wagner tied Babe Ruth for the second most number of votes, trailing only Ty Cobb in the final tally. So, yeah, he was really good. Many still consider him today to perhaps be the best shortstop that has ever played Major League Baseball.

The fact that Wagner was a superstar ball player certainly doesn’t hurt the value of his card, but the rarity of his T206 card is what really pushes his card over the edge into one of the most expensive cards of all time kind of category.

Ty Cobb’s T206 card, for example, sold in a PSA 2.5 slab for $372,000 at around the same time as Honus Wagner’s $6.6 million dollar sale in 2021, which is by the far the most that particular Ty Cobb card has ever sold for.

But when you realize that the T206 set it is considered the first mass produced set ever printed, with millions made and hundreds of thousands of cards surviving to this day, it only makes sense that a card of Honus Wager, where perhaps 200 were printed at the max estimate, and only 57 are known to still exist, would be the most valuable of the bunch.

The reason that so few of Honus Wagner’s cards were printed is not known for certain, but the commonly told rumor is that Wagner did not want his likeness used in a product that would prompt children to want to buy cigarettes, and that he spoke up against it. Less idealistic rumors say that it was actually just about him not being paid enough by the American Tobacco Company, and that he spoke up just as an excuse. But whatever the reason, the result was that his cards were taken out of the production line-up very soon after the first few batches had been printed up.

And the rest is history…