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 ...