Vintage Sports Cards – Baseball – Basketball – Football – Hockey
Tickets to sporting events can be worth more than the price of admission by Bruce Chadwick.
I love that Chadwick highlighted college football tickets. “Some of the most memory-filled tickets are from college football games. Until the early ’70s, schools large and small had colorful illustrations on the tickets, making them much more than just stubs.”
This article appeared in Edition #8 of Topps Magazine in the fall of 1991.
Bonds shattered the single-season HR mark with 73 in 2001, and someone managed to put together a complete run of 61 full tickets from each of his home run games.
The lot was available for sale in Mastro’s April 2002 catalog, and each was described as being in NM/MT to MT condition.
The keys were home run #60 on September 6 vs. the Diamondbacks, #70, which tied Mark McGwire for the single-season home run mark on October 4 vs. the Astros, #’s 71-72 when he set the new single-season home run mark on October 5 vs. the Dodgers, #73 when he established the new record on the last game of the season on October 6 vs. the Dodgers, and #6 on April 17 vs. the Dodgers which was his 500th career home run.
A lot of the tickets were obtained from season ticket holders by a collector who started the set on the first game of the season.
I ran across this ad, from Mastro of all people, in the July 1981 issue of Trader Speaks, looking to sell or trade full unused mint tickets for the world heavy-weight championship boxing match between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott at Chicago Stadium.
He mentions having five different tickets, each with clear portrait photos of the boxers, for $10 each (or for trade).
After exploring the PSA registry, it looks like Mastro was advertising a combination of phantom tickets for April 10th (white, orange, pink, and cream) and the actual fight on May 15th (blue and orange variations). Here are all the examples from Heritage Auctions.
When PSA first started grading tickets, I don’t believe they were not putting the ticket color on the slab, like the following example.
On March 2, 1962, Chamberlain scored 100 points against the New York Knicks in Hershey, Penn. 4,126 tickers were originally sold for the game, and here’s one of the remaining stubs.
This example was offered in Mastro West’s March 2000 Fine Sports Auctions catalog with a minimum bid of $900. They described it as being in Ex to Mt condition with an inscription on the back: “Wilt Chamberland (sic) scored a record 100 pts against N.Y.”
The stub was accompanied by this newspaper article describing the game.
Surviving tickets are incredibly pricey and seem to be getting more expensive; REA sold this PSA 2 graded stub for $36k in the summer of 2023.
They sold this PSA 1.5 Mk’d example approximately a year earlier for $22.2k.
Heritage has also sold several stubs, including a PSA Authentic copy for $26.4 in February 2023, another PSA Authentic copy for $49.2k in February 2022, and a PSA 2 Mk copy for $49.2k in August 2022.
Red Grange took the field for the last time on January 27, 1935, in an exhibition game at Gilmore Field in Los Angeles, a rematch of the NFL Championship game. Here’s a ticket stub from the game.
Mastro sold this example in July 1998, but I found another one offered by SCP Auctions in January 2008.
This graded example sold for $175 before the recent focus on tickets in the hobby and the run-up in their prices.
With the Athletics moving again, I thought it was a great time to share this strip of four regular-season game tickets from the Philadelphia Athletics’ inaugural season in 1901.
This strip was offered for sale in April 2000 by Ron Oser Enterprises.
Now, 1901 wasn’t just the first season for the Athletics; it was the first for the entire American League, too!