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The ultra-rare Honus Wagner card with local ties just sold for a world-record-breaking amount
In the same family for 117 years, collectors hadn’t known the 1909 Honus Wagner existed.
Around 1909, a kid named Morton Bernstein pulled a Honus Wagner baseball card from his pack of Sweet Caporal Cigarettes. Bernstein would grow up to own, with his father, a sterling silver manufacturing plant in Taunton, aka “Silver City.”
He kept his baseball card collection framed. When he moved to California, he decorated his office with them.
More than a century after little Morton’s card-pull, his grandsons Dennis and Douglas Shields finally decided to sell grandpa’s T206 Honus Wagner — known today as the holy grail of baseball cards.
While it was graded just a PSA 1 on the grading system’s scale of 1-10 (10 being best), it sold at auction Feb. 21 for some $5.12 million via Goldin auction house.
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When I interviewed Dennis Shields, 77, before the sale, I reached him at work at a Harley Davidson dealership “out in the high desert, in California on the way to Vegas.”
When I call after the sale, Shields tells me the card is “going to give me a chance to do what I’ve wanted to do: that’s retire.”
“We feel good about it. It was more than we thought we’d get originally. I mean, it’s a great card, but, realistically … it’s a PSA 1. Top cards are PSA 10. So I cannot complain.
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“Goldin was fantastic,” Shields added. “Couldn’t have picked a better crew to make it happen.”
The sale of $5,124,000 marks “one of the most significant public sales of a T206 Honus Wagner and [sets] an all-time record for the grade,” per Goldin’s press release. The Shields sale “eclipsed the previous high PSA 1 sale of $3.1 million by $2 million, or 64 percent.”
“We are honored that the Shields family chose us to represent this historic card,” Goldin CEO Ken Goldin stated in a press release.
“We hope the new owner treasures it as much as they did. The T206 Honus Wagner remains the Mona Lisa of sports cards.”
Goldin, a New Jersey native who has been collecting cards since his first trip to Fenway Park at age 12, said previously that in his “48 years of collecting, I have never known of or seen — outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art — a Honus Wagner card like this.”
Why is this card so rare?
A T206 is a tobacco card issued from 1909 to 1911 in cigarette and loose tobacco packs. The cards have a near mythic status because so few were made.
“T206 was different than every other set because it was put out [through various brands] by the American Tobacco Company. It was the first major set issued across the United States. To many people, it’s the most important trading card set ever issued,” Goldin explained previously.
“But as people were putting sets together, they were realizing: Where the hell are the Wagners? There were no Wagners. After research, it was found that before the cards really got into circulation, Wagner complained. We think he didn’t like the fact that the cards were distributed inside packs of cigarettes. He didn’t want 12-year-old boys buying packs of cigarettes to get his cards.”
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Lil’ Morton Bernstein managed to snag one.
When Goldin got a call last year that a T206 Wagner existed, he was skeptical.
The Shields sent Goldin a photo. “I magnified it on my iPhone. I’m looking (at) the card like, ‘Holy sh—,’” Goldin said previously.
“There’s a resource online where every single T206 Wagner that people know exists is listed. This card was not on there. Which meant nobody knew about this card.”
The family and their Wagner are featured on Season 3 of Netflix’s “King of Collectibles: The Goldin Touch.” The series centers on Ken Goldin’s New Jersey-based collectible empire, their treasure-hunting and auctions.
After Goldin’s “holy sh—” moment, the show’s star didn’t see the card in person until filming day, last June. We see Goldin clock the Wagner in real time and break into a grin.
“This is just ridiculous,” he says, bursting into a laugh. “I thought I knew of every single legitimate T206 Honus Wagner,” he says, then stutters with excitement. “Look, you guys have made my year.”
The roots
In the early 1970s, with his father, Bernstein purchased a silver sterling flatware manufacturing plant in Taunton, Massachusetts, called F.B. Rogers Brothers. When Bernstein moved to California to open a West Coast Division of National Silver Company, he decorated his offices with famed sports cards, including the Wagner.
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On “King of Collectibles,” Dennis explains they held onto grandpa’s card for “sentimental” reasons. “We held on to it just ’cause we loved him.”
In 2025, finally, the former Taunton silver plant owner’s family decided “it would be nice if we let someone else manage it,” Shields told me previously.
“I’ll be 78 this year. None of us know when we’re going to cash our chips in.”
Other card-holders may have had that same thought.
Goldin broke a few other records in this 2026 Winter Vintage Elite Auction — including some Boston-abilia — according to the release.
Babe Ruth’s 1918 “Batting” PSA Type I International News Photo — used for his 1927 Honey Boy Card — sold for $270,916. It makes an all-time record for any non-rookie Babe Ruth Type I Photo, per Goldin.
Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams‘s 1954 Wilson Franks card, PSA 6 EX-MT, sold for $104,920. This broke an all-time record for this card in any grade, any grading company, per Goldin.
If you’re treasure-hunting, there’s more Boston-abilia for sale now on their site, including:
- A Babe Ruth 1916 Red Sox rookie card.
- A Jaylen Brown game-used Celtics Classic Edition jersey.
- Former Celtic Paul Pierce’s game-used, signed Nikes.
- A game-used football from the 2017 Super Bowl: New England Patriots vs. Atlanta Falcons.
- A 2000 Playoff Contenders Championship Ticket Autograph Tom Brady Signed Rookie Card
- A 2024 Topps Inception Rookie Autographs Inception #RA-DM Drake Maye Signed Rookie Card.
Lauren Daley is a freelance culture writer. She can be reached at [email protected]. She tweets @laurendaley1, and Instagrams at @laurendaley1. Read more stories on Facebook here.
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