Nuns to Make Money Off Baseball ... Card

The Lord works in mysterious ways. It's a common refrain among the Christian clergy and the Christian laity, and it's certainly applicable in this case.

Seems a certain man who died a few years ago left everything he had to the order of Roman Catholic nuns to which his sister belonged. Also seems that among the man's possessions was a very rare baseball card.

Collectors will immediately recognize the value of a T206 Honus Wagner, of which only 60 are known to exist. This is the most famous baseball card in history.

The paucity of copies of this card is the first clue that the card's worth has some heft. The card is more well-known, however, in collecting circles because of why so few copies exist.

Wagner was a super baseball player, one of the best in the history of the game, one of the first five ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. A shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, he was a speedy hitter (nicknamed the "Flying Dutchman") with tremendous defensive range and a terrific eye at the plate, compiling a lifetime .328 batting average. He won the National League batting title eight times, and his Pirates won the World Series in 1909.

The baseball card in question is famous because Wagner wanted it gone. He pressured the American Tobacco Company to take his card out of production, and so the T206 series, which was printed from 1909 to 1911, is the only known series to contain a Honus Wagner card. Wagner's commonly acknowledged motivation for doing this was because he didn't want to encourage smoking by children, the natural audience for baseball cards. However, some sources say that Wagner demanded more money than ATC was willing to pay and that it was perhaps the tobacco company that pulled the plug on the Wagner card. Whatever the motivation, the card was no more.

The current card is in the hands of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, in Baltimore, Md. The nuns are planning to put the card up for auction. The last Wagner sold brought in $2.8 million, the largest amount of money ever paid for a baseball card. That was in 2007, and that card was in mint condition. The nuns hope to fetch up to $200,000 from a collector willing to put up with the slight imperfections of the card, including a few missing borders and a large crease in one corner. The deceased had owned the card since 1936 and had had the card laminated, no doubt after watching the card's value go up over the years.