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Person holding tickets over aerial shot of the 1903 World Series
There are old ticket stubs, and then there are pieces of paper that got somebody through the gates for the first World Series game ever played. One of only two known tickets from the Oct. 1, 1903 matchup between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Boston Americans is about to hit the auction block 123 years later.
The incredibly rare full ticket will headline Heritage’s October sports auction with a guide value of $250,000 and up. The Heritage listing describes it as one of only two surviving examples known from Game 1, which is a pretty remarkable survival rate for something whose original purpose was basically to get ripped by a guy standing at a stadium entrance.
Somebody Kept A Ticket To Baseball History For 123 Years
The game itself happened at Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds in Boston in front of 16,242 fans.
Pittsburgh scored four runs in the first inning and eventually beat Boston 7-3, with Deacon Phillippe throwing a complete game against Cy Young. The box score shows the whole thing lasted one hour and 55 minutes, which means baseball’s first World Series game finished faster than some modern Yankees-Red Sox pitching changes feel.
Of course, nobody walking into the ballpark that afternoon knew they were attending the birth of a championship that would still be one of America’s biggest sporting events more than a century later.
The 1903 series was technically a best-of-nine agreement between the champions of the established National League and the newer American League rather than the standardized postseason setup baseball eventually adopted.
Boston went on to win the series five games to three, overcoming a 3-1 deficit to take four straight. MLB’s history recognizes it as the first modern World Series.
And somehow one attendee apparently looked at his ticket afterward and thought, “I should probably hang onto this.”
Excellent instinct.
The Other Known Ticket Is Already In Cooperstown
The “one of two” distinction is not auction-house marketing language pulled from thin air.
Another ticket from the inaugural World Series is part of the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s collection. The Hall of Fame has displayed its surviving example while documenting how the 1903 series helped legitimize the American League and established the framework for the championship that followed.
That leaves an extremely small number available for collectors.
Heritage’s $250,000-plus estimate also creates the kind of bizarre valuation only sports memorabilia can produce. This is not a jersey Babe Ruth wore or a baseball Honus Wagner hit.
It is a century-old receipt proving somebody once walked through the gate, but that is apparently enough when the gate happened to lead into Game 1 of the first World Series.