It sold for $7.25 million, making it the most expensive piece of cardboard on Earth, yet the man on the card never wanted it printed in the first place. Behind the legendary T206 tobacco card stands Honus Wagner, the bow-legged kid from the Pennsylvania coal mines whom historians still call the greatest shortstop ever to play the game.

This episode deconstructs the mythology of Johannes Peter Wagner, tracing how brutal labor built his unlikely athletic body, how the dead-ball era made his 1908 season statistically untouchable, and how he conquered the public humiliation of being branded yellow. We also separate the folklore from the facts and reveal why his fight over his own likeness, an early battle for name, image, and likeness, accidentally created the rarest card in existence.

• How loading coal as a 12-year-old engineered the rotational power that made him a hitting and fielding force
• Why Bill James calls Wagner’s 1908 season the greatest single year in baseball history once you account for soaked, soft, spitball-era baseballs and a 2.35 league ERA
• The truth behind the famous Ty Cobb lip-busting tag story, which the play-by-play records prove never happened
• His 1909 World Series redemption, outhitting and outstealing the 22-year-old Ty Cobb to silence critics who called him a quitter
• Why his refusal to be underpaid by the American Tobacco Company, not anti-tobacco morality, choked off the supply and created the $7.25 million card