More than a century since the New York Yankees christened Yankee Stadium with a 4-1 victory over the Boston Red Sox, a ticket stub from the first game at “The House that Ruth Built” has surfaced at auction.
The 1923 game was headlined by Babe Ruth, who had already become a household name after blasting 54 home runs in 1920 and 59 in 1921 for the Yankees, and drew a crowd of 74,000 for the April 18 matchup.
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The crowd was the largest in the history of baseball at the time, according to the Society for American Baseball Research. Fittingly, Ruth hit his first home run at the ballpark during that game.
An article the next day in “The Brooklyn Daily Times” said 15,000 people were turned away at the gate. “The Babe, lean of waist and keen of eye, looked with almost childish awe at 74,217 fans gathered in the mammoth new Yankee Stadium before the opening game,” the paper reported.
But to date, just eight examples have been graded by PSA. They hardly ever sell, with the most recent changing hands publicly in 2016, when a PSA Authentic stub fetched $8,066.25.
A year prior, a PSA Authentic stub, along with a souvenir program, sold as one lot for nearly $18,000 at Heritage.
Auction records show a scant number of inaugural day stubs, with an ungraded example selling for $4,250 in 2008 at Hunt Auctions and a $3,443.95 sale in 2000 for another.
Goldin will sell a PSA Authentic/Altered copy, a designation which the auction house says is due to adhesive tape on the upper portion of the stub, in its upcoming Goldin 100 Auction.
Other mementos from the game have fetched major sums at auction in the past, including a souvenir program, which sold for $4,392 at Goldin in October.
Another coveted piece of memorabilia is a pin given out to members of the press during the game. One sold for $12,650 at SCP Auctions in 2010. When Lelands sold one in 2000 for nearly $4,500, the auction house said in the description it was the only one known outside of the Hall of Fame, though it is unclear how many more, if any, have been discovered since.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.