Are We in the Golden Age of Ticket Collecting?

I’m beginning to think we are living in the golden age of ticket collecting. The strange part is that we may not realize it until it’s over.

For most of their history, tickets were disposable. You bought one, went to the game or concert, handed it to an usher, and whatever remained went into a pocket, drawer or trash can. Nobody leaving Yankee Stadium in 1927 was thinking about preserving a ticket because Babe Ruth might hit his 60th home run that afternoon.

That’s exactly why the survivors matter today.

But something else is happening now.

Paper tickets are disappearing.

Mobile ticketing has changed the basic nature of our hobby. A ticket used to be a physical artifact connecting someone to a specific moment in history. Today, admission may be nothing more than a barcode temporarily displayed on a phone.

You can’t put that in a shoebox.

At the same time, collectors have more information available than ever before. We can research obscure games in seconds, identify the exact date of a player’s debut, discover an unusual historical event, compare auction results and locate tickets that might have remained buried in collections for decades.

And the definition of a collectible ticket is expanding.

It isn’t just World Series and Super Bowl tickets anymore. Collectors chase debuts, records, final games, concerts, political events, historic moments and wonderfully strange events that might have seemed completely insignificant when they happened.

A ticket is becoming less about admission and more about evidence that you were there.

That combination may never happen again: millions of old paper tickets still waiting to be discovered, powerful research tools helping us understand what they represent, and a growing realization that the physical ticket itself is becoming extinct.

Maybe prices will rise. Maybe they won’t. That isn’t really the point.

The golden age of ticket collecting may simply be the period when we finally understood what these little pieces of paper were—just before they stopped making them.

Will the next generation collect what they can’t hold?