With baseball season underway, hopes are high at auction houses selling sports memorabilia. Prime example: a rare Honus Wagner T206 baseball card is on the block at Robert Edward Auctions. Already bidders over several days have driven the price over the $1 million mark.

“The bidders are very excited about this particular card because it’s one of the finest examples in existence,” Brian Dwyer of Robert Edward Auctions told ESPN. “Only four cards are graded higher than this card.”

Dwyer has said that only 50 to 70 are known to exist, and that he expects this auction to reach “1.5 million dollars, or even little more is very realistic.”

The auction began on April 2 with a $100,000 starting bid. The amount has rapidly soared and continues its ascent.

The Honus Wagner T206 Baseball card.
Photo: Courtesy of Robert Edward Auctions.

Only Two Previous Owners

Dubbed by the auction house as “The Oceanside Wagner.” the card has had only two owners in the 106 years since it was printed in 1909.

According to the auction house, the card was found in a basement of a house in Oceanside, New York, “alongside hundreds of other 1910-era tobacco cards.”

The card was sold as a part of an estate sale at Philip Weiss Auctions for $791,000 in 2008.

William Klein, Baseball Cards (1955).
Photo: artnet.

The card was originally issued by a tobacco company. As explained by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a T206 is part of the “White Border” series issued between 1909 and 1911 “to promote sixteen brands of cigarettes and loose tobacco distributed by the American Tobacco Company.”

The auction ends on April 25.