Controversy has clung to Honus Wagner like the moist tobacco it was packed with almost since the day it was first issued. No one is absolutely sure why the American Tobacco Company (ATC) pulled it from production sometime from 1909 through 1911. “The most popular story to explain it is that Wagner wished to play no role in the promotion of the use of tobacco [particularly setting a bad example for children], though it has been justly stated that he was himself a user and had appeared in advertisements for many tobacco products previously,” Heritage Auctions said in its catalog description of two Wagner cards it has sold; one in poor condition sold for $227,050, and the other simply authentic, $262,900. “Another theory notes Wagner’s reputation as a fierce negotiator, arguing that it was nothing more than a case of a failure to agree upon a dollar figure that led ATC to end production of Wagner’s cards almost as soon as it had started.”
Lelands, the oldest big sports auction house, came heavily down one side of the debate during an auction of a Wagner which sold for $657,250 in January 2014. “While it flies in today’s world that Wagner was anti-tobacco, the theory has been discredited,” it said. “In fact, he endorsed several cigar products and is pictured with a mouth full of chewing tobacco on his 1948 Leaf card. The short print is probably due to Wagner wanting to be paid for use of his image.”
In 1959 the Sport Hobbyist ran a story with a wonderful headline, “Honus & Tobacco: For It or Agin It?” pointing out that that card was bringing as much as $75 apiece! ($608.64, adjusted for inflation.) “No one was ‘Living Modern’ in 1908,” wrote Charles “Buck” Barker in an endearing sort of stream of consciousness. “The cigarette was still known as the Coffin Nail; supposedly women weren’t even smoking them on the sly. Not smoking himself, the writer can’t imagine why a cig was more devilish than a chew.”(Courtesy of Peter Nash's T206 Wagner research collection.)
Barker proceeded to detail Wagner’s endorsement of 10-cent cigar brand during his playing career before turning his attention to the baseball card Leaf issue in 1948 while Wagner was a Pittsburgh Pirates coach. “Who do we have?” he asked the reader. “Wagner, of course, stuffing a big chew into his mouth from a bag in his hand, brand unidentified. By the way, I can’t think of another card in existence showing a ball player using tobacco. Rather surprising when you think of the volume of cigarette and other tobacco cards and testimonials”
In fact that assessment of the Flying Dutchman’s affinity for tobacco may be an understatement in light of an extremely rare photo of him thoroughly enjoying a cigar in his twilight years- first reported in Sports Collectors Daily. For baseball history buffs, it shouldn’t escape notice that Hyee Auctions recently sold it on eBay for $86. “The mere existence of this image debunks the many false rumors created over the years!” declared Henry Yee of Hyee Auctions in its description. Its eBay listing was just as definitive: “1951 Wire Photo HONUS WAGNER Pittsburgh Pirates SMOKING a CIGAR— No Way!” I emailed the photo to a number of experts whose opinions I respect and none could recall with any certainty ever seeing it.
“Say it ain’t a Stogie, Honus!” said Joe Phillips a veteran hobbyist and authenticator of game-used baseball gloves for Heritage. In his one-upmanship, Phillips, like a good pool player, is banking a Joe Jackson myth to shoot the Wagner myth in the pocket. An urchin, standing on courthouse steps after Joe Jackson testified in the 1919 Black Sox scandal, was said to have cried “Say It Ain’t So, Joe,” although this immortal phrase is surely another part of baseball’s folklore.
Artifacts have a way of adding a third dimension to our knowledge of earlier civilizations. “The history of the hobby is as important as baseball and the two kind of parallel each other,” Evans says.
My history professors at Georgetown taught me not to judge the past with 20/20 hindsight but within the context of the times. By today’s standards, it seems shocking that small children collecting baseball cards in the early 1900s were permitted to buy packs of cigarettes, a major card company issued a card in 1948 that showed one of the greatest players of all-time enjoying a big chew, and major leaguers appeared on tobacco cards as recently as the mid-1950s in the beautiful Red Man chewing tobacco set. Growing up in the late 1970s, I remember the magazine ads with two baseball players I admired, the Yankees’ Bobby Murcer and the Red Sox’s Carlton Fisk, pitching for Skoal, smokeless tobacco I was very tempted to try. In fact I think I did buy it, without telling my parents, but spit it out.
Call me a Marxist, but glued to the back of the Wagner wire photo is a revealing yellowed news clip accompanying its publication. “Back in 1895 a 22-year-old youngster name of Hans Wagner decided baseball at $40 per month beat digging coal out of coal mines,” it noted. In all likelihood, Wagner was playing hardball with ATC because it represented one more monopoly that had to audacity to short-change him— just like baseball whose “reserve clause” and antitrust exemption allowed it to treat its labor like chattel until a powerful union altered the balance of power in the players’ favor decades after Wagner’s death.
For its part, ATC’s trust controlled almost 90 percent of U.S. cigarette, snuff, chewing, and pipe tobacco sales. “American Tobacco had bought out over 200 competitors, using such tactics as ‘fighting brands,’” says the Constitutional Rights Foundation. “These were cigarettes sold below cost in order to bankrupt competitors.” (Does this sound like the Walmart of its day?) During the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt, the federal government filed suit against ATC, leading to its breakup.
As I wrote in another post, thanks to the Topps’ monopoly, the father of modern baseball cards, Sy Berger, was still getting away with paying with paying players $5 for permission to put them on Topps baseball cards in the 1960s. Marvin Miller, having made a name for himself bargaining for steelworkers, first helped fund the players’ union by making sure that the players received their fair share of baseball card revenue.
Because it owns a Wagner which it occasionally puts on display, the New York Public Library tried to clarify the situation on its website: “Wagner was no anti-smoking zealot. His granddaughter set the record straight in 1992. ‘He always had a wad of chewbacca in his mouth, and he wasn’t against tobacco at all. His concern was that he didn’t want children to have to buy tobacco in order to get his card… That’s the fact behind it. It wasn’t that he didn’t get paid for it, or he was against tobacco, he just didn’t want children to have to buy tobacco at young age in order to get his card”
Huh? That doesn’t exactly set the record straight in my book. In 1948 kids could have just as easily bought cigars with a very similar image of him as on the card or bought chewbacca (a word I didn’t know existed other than for a Star Wars character) because he was a role model.
Evans, known for his bluntness, called the legend of Wagner’s principled position in defense of children “bull shit.” He reminded me of another myth, this one perpetuated on patriotic grounds. “Think about Abner Doubleday,” he says. “The most interesting thing in the hobby is not the Wagner. It’s that the first piece in the Hall of Fame was fake”
The Doubleday myth resulted from a commission formed in 1905 that sought to establish that baseball was invented in the United States rather than being an offshoot of the British game of rounders. After giving credit to Abner Doubleday, a future Civil War general, for fathering baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, one of the town’s patriarchs, bought a torn dark brown baseball purportedly used by Doubleday and mounted the ball in an exhibition in town— paving the way for the Baseball Hall of Fame. The problem was that Doubleday was at West Point, 154 miles away from Cooperstown at the time, and the eyewitness, Abner Graves, would have been five years old when Doubleday diagramed the game for him. Besides being an Anglophobe, according to the website Baseball Revisited, “several years later the 79-year-old shot and killed his 36 year old wife Minnie. He died 2 years later in an insane asylum.”
I asked Evans if, like the Mastro/Gretzy Wagner, which the dealer Bill Mastro confessed to have trimming, the Hall of Fame’s phony baseball was Teflon. “There is a vast difference between the Teflon Wagner and Double Trouble ball,” he said. “The Wagner, if not altered, is still a half million to a million dollar card. That ball is $10000 [as a vintage 19th century lemon-peel baseball]. If it were real, it would probably be worth $5 to $10 million as the ball that invented the game. Now it’s a curiosity behind a great baseball ruse, so it be worth $25 to $50 thousand dollars. The Wagner, begrudgingly by Mastro, who was policed by the FBI, and the ball, begrudgingly by Hall of Fame officials who were policed by a legion of hobby historians and SABR (Society of American Baseball Research) members.” Telling the truth is as patriotic as mom, apple pie, and baseball.
