November Pick-Ups

[Scott Garner]

Originally Posted by rlevy

Scott, great collection! I was wondering, since so many of the teams don't print tickets for their season ticket holders, is it more difficult to find no-hitter tickets for games pitched recently than for games pitched in the good old days?

Rick

Thanks Rick!
There is no doubt that teams no-longer printing tickets is going to make collecting my theme extremely challenging moving forward. It's really sad because it eventually will lead to the death of collecting a theme like this.
When this happens I've come to the conclusion that I will have to focus my collecting to only vintage tickets.

Re; your question, each scenario has its own unique set of challenges.

In the good old days, fans didn't frequently save their tickets because they were often viewed as yesterday's trash and were tossed. To add to this, WWII saw paper items of all types disappear due to the war effort. Finding vintage tickets is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack (as I know you're aware of) since you collect Koufax tickets. For this reason I believe that vintage tickets will always have value because of limited supply and increasing demand.
The amount of baseball ticket collectors in the hobby has increased dramatically since 1998 and vintage tickets, like other memorabilia, still rules the roost IMHO.

Modern cardboard season tickets are infrequently actually being used by many seat holders due to e-tickets, leading to a prevalence of perfect mint tickets that are not torn like their earlier predecessors. This makes for easier collecting, but reduced potential for ever becoming a collectable that increases in value.

Even though this may be a crazy analogy, I actually see collecting vintage tickets to be a bit like collecting antique milk bottles. Eventually neither may exist, but there will still be collectors because of the novelty of them being reminiscent of a bygone era...