One of the rarest baseball cards is up for auction - and there are local connections

"The King of Collectibles has been collecting since his first trip to Fenway Park at age 12. "I'm 60. In my 48 years of collecting, I have never known of or seen - outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art - a Honus Wagner card like this. Until now," Ken Goldin, star of Netflix's "King of Collectibles: The Goldin Touch," tells me in a recent phone interview."

""The amazing thing about the card is - unlike any other type of asset - there's never been a recorded instance where somebody bought a T206 Wagner in any grade, and then, in the future, sold for less than what they paid," Goldin says. Some 116 years after lil' Morton pulled a Wagner from his pack, his grandsons Dennis and Douglas Shields are finally ready to sell. The cards have a near mythic status because so few were made, Goldin explains. So when he got the call last year that one existed, he was skeptical."

A rare T206 Honus Wagner card from the 1909–1911 tobacco set is being offered at auction with bidding closing Feb. 21. The card was originally pulled from a Sweet Caporal Cigarettes pack by Morton Bernstein, whose family later operated a sterling silver plant in Taunton. Bernstein's grandsons, Dennis and Douglas Shields, are now selling the card. T206 Wagners carry near-mythic status because of their extreme scarcity. Ken Goldin notes the cards have historically never sold for less than their purchase price, and he was initially skeptical when told one existed.

Read at Boston.com