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Depending on which baseball historian you ask, Honus Wagner is anywhere from the second-best to the 13th-best player of all time – a shortstop without peer and a hitter with no weakness. The influential statistician Bill James rates Wagner’s 1908 season as the greatest ever.

But no-one gets to choose how they are remembered, and to the wider world Wagner, who retired in 1917, is now best known as ‘the guy on the really expensive baseball card’. Between 1909 and 1911, the American Tobacco Company issued its T206 set of baseball cards in packs of cigarettes. Wagner objected to being featured, possibly because he was uneasy about the idea of kids buying cigarettes to get hold of his card, or because he wanted more money from the ATC for the use of his image.

Either way, very few T206 Wagner cards were distributed, and those that survive (perhaps 60) have become an asset class all of their own, with one selling for $3.12m in 2016.

In that context, the artefact pictured here, which is both rarer and more interesting than a T206, looks cheap. Dating from 1912, it is one of only six Wagner bats known to exist, and the only one authenticated by matching the wood grain to a period photograph. It is a huge club, weighing 3.19lb (a full pound more than the bats used by most Major Leaguers today), and it bears the marks of many mighty thwacks. It will be offered by Heritage Auctions in Dallas on 27-28 February, and is valued at $800,000-plus.