Most Expensive Baseball Trading Cards Sold at Auction (All Time)
Source:
Wikipedia
Key Findings
🏆
Mickey Mantle 1952 Topps RC (PSA 9) leads in Auction Price (Million USD) with 12.60 in 2022.
📊
Average Auction Price (Million USD) in 2022: 7.08 · median: 7.33.
📅
2022 recorded the highest combined total across all categories.
↔️
Gap in 2022: Mickey Mantle 1952 Topps RC (PSA 9) is 11.7× larger than Ted Williams 1939 Play Ball RC (PSA 10).
About This Dataset
Most Expensive Baseball Trading Cards Sold at Auction (All Time)
Baseball trading cards ranked by sale price at auction in millions of USD. A Honus Wagner T206 card in PSA VG-EX 4 condition sold for $7.25 million at Heritage Auctions in 2022, making it the most expensive baseball card ever sold. The T206 Wagner is the most famous card in existence — printed around 1909, Wagner demanded its withdrawal from production, leaving perhaps 50 to 200 examples in various conditions, each worth extraordinary sums and making it the definitive blue-chip asset of the sports card collecting world.
Analysis
Mickey Mantle 1952 Topps RC (PSA 9) heads the table on 12.6, ahead of Babe Ruth 1916 Sporting News (PSA 8) (7.40) and Honus Wagner T206 (1909, PSA 5) (7.25) in Auction Price (Million USD) in 2022. 11.5 separates the highest figure (12.6) from the lowest (1.08). First and second are separated by 5.20, so the leader sits inside the field rather than apart from it.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Wikipedia
- Coverage
- 8 entities · 2020–2022 (3 years) · 8 observations
- Measure
- Auction Price (Million USD)
- Last updated
- 6 September 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
How the figures are calculated
- Values use the measure and unit named on this page. Consult the dataset description and cited source for coverage, definitions and any unit conversions. Displayed values may be rounded for readability.
- Missing years are left empty rather than estimated — no interpolation, no carrying a previous year forward.
- Change is measured between the first and last year in which an entity actually reported a value, so a series that starts late is not penalised for the years before it existed.
- The compound annual rate is (last ÷ first)^(1 ÷ years) − 1, using those same two reported years.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value in 2022.
- An entity that reported nothing in the latest year is still listed — it follows the ranked entities in the table rather than being dropped.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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