For baseball purists, a Dodgers-Yankees World Series is perfect.
The rivalry, while dormant in recent years, is monumental in baseball lore. The Dodgers and Yankees have faced off in the Fall Classic 12 times, five more than any other matchup in history.
But while the East Coast vs. West Coast rivalry raises excitement, ticket collectors have little to cheer for.
“Talk about the two worst teams, you know, in a World Series, being the Yankees and Dodgers. for World Series ticket collecting purposes,” said Matt Fuller, the head of ticketing authentication at PSA.
Fuller hasn’t seen a Yankees box office ticket surface since 2021. And while he has seen Dodgers tickets more recently, despite the team moving to mobile tickets in 2014, they are certainly not easy to come by.
“Dodgers tickets have surfaced from this year,” Fuller said. “There's been a few guys who've been pretty lucky and maybe talked to their season-ticket rep and been able to have their tickets printed.”
Both teams confirmed to cllct they will only have digital tickets available for the series, with no exceptions.
The number of graded tickets has been on a steady decline in recent years, but now the reduction has nearly come to a complete stop.
When the Dodgers were last in the World Series in 2020, the number of graded tickets by PSA was 222; but the only reason totals reached that high was because the series was played in Arlington, Texas, a neutral site, and not at Dodger Stadium.
But while the Dodgers and Yankees are two of the league’s stingiest teams when it comes to obtaining a physical ticket, they are not alone. The entire league has trended in the same direction.
While there are teams that will happily give you a printed ticket (ironically, the Angels and Red Sox are two teams Fuller noted are great at accommodating), mobile ticketing is certainly the preferred method.
Since the Dodgers last played in the World Series, in 2022, the number of graded tickets have been essentially cut in half each year, dropping to 102 for Braves-Astros in 2021 and 66 for Phillies-Astros in 2022.
Last season, which featured the lowest-rated World Series in history between the Diamondbacks and Rangers, the number of graded tickets on PSA waned to just two.
When the Yankees were last in the World Series, 2009, that number was 559.
Now, with baseball's two biggest franchises set to battle, the number will be zero, based on what the two teams told cllct.
“Has mobile ticketing made it harder to collect tickets? Yes,” said Howard Citron, who has collected tickets for decades. “And is that sad? Yes. ... Tickets provide tangible proof.
“If I go to a game with my son or with my dad,” Citron added, “it’s not just saying I was at this game, it’s proving it. ... It's a lasting memory.”
Fuller said he expects some Dodgers tickets to somehow make it through the cracks, despite what the team said publicly. But that won’t be the case for the Yankees, who are set to make history in what would be a collector’s nightmare.
“No matter what,” Fuller said, “this will be the first World Series where there's not a World Series ticket to exist from one team, that team being the Yankees.”
But baseball is not the only sport where this is the case.
Super Bowl LV in 2021 in Tampa, Florida, marked the first year where only mobile ticketing was accepted, the NFL confirmed to cllct. It was also the first Super Bowl since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — played in front of a mostly empty stadium with 25,000 fans, 7,500 of whom were health-care professionals.
And while the league began offering collectible tickets to fans in 2023 at Super Bowl LVII, those tickets would not grant you admission and thus would not be accepted for grading by PSA.
While graded tickets had already been in decline before COVID-19, the pandemic truly sparked the near universal shift to mobile tickets.
The NBA and NHL did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but here is the graded ticket population for championship events since 2019:
NBA
- 2024: 1
- 2023: 0
- 2022: 2
- 2021: 6
- 2020: 0 (COVID-19 bubble in Orlando)
- 2019: 59
NHL
- 2024: 0
- 2023: 0
- 2022: 0
- 2021: 0
- 2020: 0 (COVID-19 bubble)
- 2019: 66
“For an already existing big push to go mobile, COVID-19 was definitely the nail in the coffin and a convenient way for teams to be able to move on from physical tickets,” Fuller said. “On top of the obvious, like being contactless, it helps many other things: preventing counterfeit ticketing, collecting personal information, being able to send marketing emails, knowing who is sitting where, frequency of visiting the ballpark, etc.”
Every team has an ability to print tickets, Fuller emphasized, but some, like the Yankees, simply refuse to use it. For those who have purchased a mobile ticket, but have had trouble accessing it, Fuller has even seen teams escort the fan to their seat rather than print a standard ticket, but that’s not even the worst of it.
“I've seen them (ticketing office) literally take a piece of paper and hand it to you that says, you know, like, section A, row 12, right?” Fuller said. “You hold that and walk in with it. Just, it's crazy, the amount of trouble they go through instead of just simply hitting the print button.”
“It's such a killer.”
Ironically though, it may help the hobby as a whole.
Fewer tickets means the ones that exist are rarer and more valuable, Citron said. It’s basic economics, when the supply drops, the demand increases.
Ticket collecting, Citron predicts, will follow the same trends as vinyl collecting and Type I photography.
"I can't tell you a time where there's been more interest in tickets," Citron said. “Everything now is digital. People want vintage.”
Since 2021, the number of Type I photographs sold at major auction houses Goldin, REA, Memory Lane and Heritage has nearly doubled every year.
Like Type I photography, vinyl sales continue to grow. Although vinyl’s comeback began more than a decade earlier. In 2006, vinyl sales reached an abyss, with less than 1 million sales nationwide. In 2023, that number reached over 43 million, marking the 17th consecutive year of growth.
There’s no reason why tickets shouldn’t do the same, Citron said, emphasizing the emotional importance that tickets can provide.
“I’m going to want that Sandy Koufax ticket that my dad or grandad talked about,” Citron said.
So, is it unfortunate the Dodgers and Yankees won’t print tickets? Yes. Will it hurt the hobby? Maybe not.
“It hurts the collector,” Citron said. “I don’t think it hurts the overall viability of ticket collecting.”
Matt Liberman is a reporter and video producer for cllct.