A 50-year fan of the Oakland A's started posting some of his older tickets to eBay last week.
He had moved from Oakland to New Mexico in retirement and had gone back through his boxes where he had stored his tickets to "clean house" after relocating.
"I didn't think of money when I was saving them," said the man, who requested to remain anonymous. "I kept them as souvenirs."
The fan was a partial A's season-ticket holder from the late 1970s through the 1980s, sitting three rows back down the third-base line.
The time seemed right to get rid of many of those tickets, along with a separate auction for 13 full tickets from the 1989 season, the season when the A's won their ninth and last World Series.
Immediately, the man, who admittedly doesn't collect or sell any sports items, started to receive private messages. Having sold thousands of items relating to historic photography and motion-picture crew related items, he was at least familiar with buyer-seller discourse.
"I know how the games are played with immediate offers," he said. "I got a fast $500 offer, $2,000, $3,000 and $7,000. No one told me the specifics of the ticket or obviously the previous sales."
Before posting the tickets, the man said he has cross-checked the dates with highlights from the A's 1989 season — but he hadn't looked closely at the visiting teams.
After doing some more research, the fan discovered his ticket from A's Opening Day in 1989 also doubled as the major-league debut of Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr.'s debut. He pulled down that Mariners-A's ticket from April 3, 1989, and reposted it as such.
With one small, but important detail.
It was a full ticket.
To date, PSA has graded 21 tickets to Junior's debut, but a full ticket had never surfaced before.
Why was it full and not used?
Games were hard to make, for a period of five years, the man said. He worked in the film industry and had to commute to Los Angeles every week.
In the winter of 2022, the highest graded Griffey Jr. debut ticket at the time, graded a PSA 6, sold at Leland's for $43,550.40. Since then, a signed ticket, graded PSA 7, also has surfaced.
But nothing like the full ticket this A's fan somehow saved for more than 35 years.
With a week left in the eBay auction, there have been 82 bids on the ticket, which currently sits at $16,000.
And it would be hard to believe — given how so many ticket collectors prefer the full version to the ripped stub — the Leland's sale won't be topped.
"Time to find new homes for many stored treasures," the man said. "I lucked out on this one!"
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct.com and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectible market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.