GLASS ACT: An extremely rare Honus Wagner baseball card can be viewed in a glass display at Audemars Piguet Flagship Boutique for the duration of the auction. (
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The holy grail of baseball cards is on the Internet auction block — and the bidding is already nearing $1.3 million, heading to a possible $3 million.
The Honus Wagner “cigarette” card, one of the most valuable ever manufactured, is on public display at Audemars Piguet Flagship Boutique on East 57th Street.
“The Honus Wagner card is the Mona Lisa, the Van Gogh of our industry,” said Ken Goldin, founder of Goldin Auctions.
“You can be a casual baseball fan, but if there’s one baseball card you’ve heard of — it’s the Honus Wagner.”
The card itself has its own plaque in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
Even before Babe Ruth broke into the majors, Wagner, a Pittsburgh Pirate shortstop known as “The Flying Dutchman,” was racking up batting titles and getting endorsement contracts.
But as skilled as Wagner was, it’s the scarcity of the card that makes it such a collectors item.
Although the market was flooded with thousands of Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson cards in 1909, only 200 of the Wagner cards were made, and only about 50 are still around.
In the days before the cards were packaged with bubble gum, they were sold with cigarettes, and Wagner, even though he smoked, didn’t want children to have to buy tobacco products to get the card.
Wagner forced the company to recall the card, but not before a collectors item was born.
The last time a Wagner card was publicly sold was in 2012, when it was auctioned for $1.2 million.
Since then, the average Honus Wagner card — depending on its condition — has appreciated 70 percent in value.
The mint-condition card that’s currently on the block has been in the hands of a private collector and locked in a bank vault for the past five years.
The opening bid for the auction, which ends on April 5, was $500,000. It is expected to fetch more than $3 million.
“If you collect art, you dream to own an original Picasso . . . if you collect fine cars, you would dream to one day own a 1957 Ferrari 250 Testarossa,” the auction house said in its description.
“In the world of sports memorabilia, it is the . . . Wagner, and this is the finest example you will likely have the chance to own in your lifetime.”