The Card

For many years, the holy grail of baseball card collectors has been what they call the "Honus Wagner T206," a card showing a picture of Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Honus Wagner.

Wagner, who played from 1897 to 1917, was one of the first five players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He tied for second place with Babe Ruth, behind Ty Cobb. Cobb himself -- not a man given to praising much of anybody or anything besides Ty Cobb -- and pitching legend Christy Mathewson lauded Wagner as one of the best players ever to take the field.

But he's best known as the face on The Card, that aforementioned Honus Wagner T206. Baseball cards today come in packs of their own and many folks may remember when they came with bubble gum, but at the turn of the century they showed up in all kinds of things, including cigarette packs. The American Tobacco Company (ATC) published its T206 series from 1909 to 1911, but Honus objected to being included in that series. According to The Card authors Michael O'keeffe and Teri Thompson, either Honus didn't want kids buying cigarettes in order to collect his baseball card or he wasn't big on ATC making money off his image without giving him a cut. The more things change...

Anyway, probably not more than 200 Wagner T206 cards were actually released. Most of them today look the way you'd expect 100-year-old pieces of cardboard that started life in a package of tobacco to look. Smudged, faded, creased, worn at the edges, etc. But The Card, known officially as the "Gretzky T206 Honus Wagner" and featured on the cover of the book, is still brightly-colored and crisp at the edges, which is why different people, including hockey great Wayne Gretzky, have ponied up several million dollars over the years acquiring it from one another. In September of 2007, an anonymous collector spent $2.8 million to buy it at auction.

Investigative journalists O'keeffe and Thompson detail how The Card appeared in the 1980s and brought with it the beginning of the high-dollar sports card craze. Most of the trappings of that business that are taken for granted -- quality grading firms, authenticators, eyebrow-raising claims of veracity -- stem from the original push to verify and "prove" that the Gretzky T206 was the real deal. While the authors seem to accept The Card was in fact printed in that ATC T206 run, they offer evidence of an origin that falls well into the realm of shady doings.

Folks who are really into sports memorabilia will have their own opinion about whether or not this three-and-three-quarters square-inch piece of cardboard is worth almost as much as a real baseball player. But The Card is a pretty interesting look at how this business began and some of the less-redeeming features of an enterprise that involves grown men spending millions of dollars on broken bats, scuffed balls, dirty uniforms, stinky shoes, sweaty hats and so on because they may have been used by or may have been signed by an athlete at some point.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm heading off to the store to pick up my run of the newest collectible craze: Clergy Cards. The latest set has a pretty good Billy Graham (Position: Elder statesman; Preaches: Anywhere), T.D. Jakes (Position: Loosed!; Preaches: Amplification optional) and Jeremiah Wright (Position: Under the bus; Preaches: Let's not go there).