Nuns Get Their Baseball Card Money After All

The School Sisters of Notre Dame, an order in Baltimore, have turned over their rare Honus Wagner T206 baseball card and received $220,000. From their point of view, the deal is done. However, the deal almost didn't get done at all.

The original bidder didn't come through, apparently. Stepping into the breach at the end of the 30-day payment period was another bidder who was initially scared away by the amount of the bid but later decided to pay the full amount when he was approached by the auction house. The fact that he was Catholic probably didn't hurt his chances, either of being approached or being willing to pay a few tens of thousands of dollars more than he was originally intended to pay.

That's all water under the bridge now, as the card now belongs to Nicholas DePace, a doctor from Philadelphia who plans to display one of just a few known representations of "The Flying Dutchman" in a sports memorabilia museum to be built outside Philadelphia, in Collingswood, N.J. DePace, a longtime collector, has amassed some impressive items in his collection over the years, including uniforms belonging to Jackie Robinson, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth. His interests extend past baseball to include a uniform worn by NBA legend Wilt Chamberlain.

To that he will be able to add one of the rarest baseball cards of them all. The Wagner card was part of the T206 series, a group of cards produced between 1909 and 1911. This particular card is so rare because so few of the original issue exist — and that is because they were made for just a few years, at the insistence of Wagner, one of the game's great all-around players, excelling hitting, fielding, and leadership for 21 seasons, mostly with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Two theories about why Wagner wanted production of the card to stop abound, the more favorable being that he didn't want children, then the main collectors of the cards, buying the other product made by the card-makers, the American Tobacco Company.

The card came to the nuns in the first place by way of a brother of a nun, who recently died and who had kept the card since he acquired it in 1936. The top price paid for a mint condition Honus Wagner card is $2.8 million, back in 2007. The card that DePace got this time round is in poorer condition but it still one of only 60 of its kind.