How many Wags?
 

It seems like a Wagner is popping up once or twice a year in auctions these days. And crowd wisdom seems to peg the total number of Wagners surviving to be around 50, give or take a few that haven't see light in a while. T206Resource.com shows 46 unique examples.

What percentage of the Wagners that left the factory do you think survive to this day? 10%? - meaning there were ~500 issued. 50%? - meaning there were ~100 issued? Or maybe 1%, meaning that there were 5000 released in cigarette packs.

The true answer may be lost to time, but it is something we can take an educated guess at. So what's your estimate? Of all the Wagners that we can hold in our hands today, what percentage does that represent of all the ones that were released, and therefore existed at some point in the past?

Ostensibly the percentage should be the same as any other major star. Unfortunately I don't think we have much in the way of production numbers on say the 4 Cobb cards. You could also argue that it might be a higher percentage because it was known pretty early on by Burdick etc that it was tough, so probably less likely to have been destroyed/lost at an earlier date than most cards.

Just to make up numbers, if 100,000 Red Cobbs were produced and there are 5,000 left today I would expect that 5% of the Wagner's survived also putting the original number at somewhere around 1,000. I just pulled those numbers out of the air to illustrate the logic though. You might also have to deal with back/factory info to account for differing production runs, though the Wags all have common backs AFAIK

I think it was far less than any of those choices. We have articles from 1909 that say kids were looking for that card as well as for Cobb. However, where there are articles talking about people finding Cobb, there are none that I know about finding a Wagner. The card wasn't even known to the hobby until 1930. If there were thousands or even hundreds, surely a few collectors would know someone who found a Wagner.

The card was instantly the most valuable baseball card when discovered. When most cards were a penny or two, Wagner was $50.00. People have a tendency to hold on to valuable items. During WWII when people were recycling paper, people would be much more likely to have kept a Wagner than any other t206, even Cobb. In my opinion at least 50% of Wagners still exist.

Also, t206s are plentiful. Every major auction in the last 50 years have huge groups of them. If there were that many more Wagners, there would be more known copies. Surprised there are 46 known.

I think the only reason it feels like there are more and the only reason why we see them more is because owners of those cards now want to profit off the recent spikes in prices.
This is happening with a lot of cards that we rarely saw hit auction in the last 5 to 10 years but with the new higher prices people are taking the profits.

Thought for a moment we were discussing Wives and Girlfriends. Mildly disappointed.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...aft-picks.html

Me too. Anyway, I vote for Paulina Gretzky. If I were married to her, I'd be using my Woods all the time..

Once or twice a year? I think they have been showing up almost 1 a month for the past 5-6 months.
Last time I checked combined PSA and SGC pop report was in the low 60's.
Not sure what you are really looking for with your question - as previously stated it is very known that not many Wagners (relative to other players, Doyle error and Plank excepted) made it into the hands of the tobacco buying public. The Irony to me is there are quite a few cards with significantly lower populations/examples available - just likely none that will ever reach the storied level and demand that the T206 has.

I gotta believe there were a lot more released than we can imagine. (Forgive the ignorance...) Did Wagner, in fact, tell the tobacco monger(s) to shove it and remove his cards from their products? Is it documented? (I thought the anti-tobacco 'story' was more or less anecdotal.) If that's a "yes," then logically there would've been plenty out in the marketplace before the controversy unfolded, and the cards ceased being printed. Those Honus horses would've left the barn in the same quantities as the other players (assuming it wasn't a short-print scenario, of course).

I have always gone by the 50 or less theory..

We have production numbers (which many not even be complete due to the Brett Litho. fire) for some of the other T card sets. Of course, we do not have a total count of surviving cards to calculate the %, but it seems the % is pretty clearly very, very low for them. The survival rate of all T cards are probably pretty similar.

Just guessing
 

It's hard to vote in the poll, due to we just have so little information to work with. Here would be my guesses.
The T206 set was issued over 100 years ago. For most of those 100+ years, probably 99% of the population viewed T206 cards as worthless pieces of paper. I would guess 99% of the T206 cards have been either thrown away or destroyed, or just haven't been found yet.
It seems 45 to 70 Wagner's (various opinions) still exist. I would think that is more than 1% of the Wagner's created. Maybe 10%. The Wagner was known as rare and somewhat valuable, but by what percentage of the population - 5% ?
So that's my guesses. Around 500 Wagner's were made, 10% are left.
One thing I am certain of. More Wagners will be found and pop up over time. That is one of the great things about our hobby. Stuff is always being found that was lost, misplaced, or just not known to be valuable.

I was not familiar with the production numbers, so I googled it. An article in the Sports Collector's Digest said that production could be as high as 370 million (based on cigarette pack sales), and as many as 1.6 million T206 cards still exist. Those are huge numbers, but definitely a very low survival rate.

I don't believe anyone ever verified that a Wagner card was actually inserted into a pack. Did any of the old-timers ever report someone getting one in a pack of cigarettes ?

I think there's enough evidence to assume he was inserted in Sweet Caporal packs, trying to even guess how many is hard to do because there's nothing to compare it with.
I believe there were a few series of SC150/25 and SC150/30 printings and Wagner was included in only one of those printings.

Pat
 

+ 1 and like plank....