Aaron Judge debut tickets outnumber every other debut, and the median one sells for $232

Nothing in PSA's ticket report has been certified as often as the game Aaron Judge debuted in. It sits 43% clear of the next debut and comfortably ahead of both Lionel Messi's Barcelona debut and LeBron James's NBA debut. That supply is the answer to what one is worth. Fifty public sales are on record between May 2018 and May 2026, they total $27,336, and the middle one is $232. An unsigned copy has never cleared $1,320. Prices come from the sold data we compile from Heritage, Goldin and Fanatics Collect; every PSA grade quoted has been read back off the cert rather than taken from the auction title.

Two nights at Yankee Stadium, 563 graded copies apart

Judge came up on 13 August 2016 against Tampa Bay and homered on his first swing that mattered, a 446-foot drive to centre off Matt Andriese. Tyler Austin, also debuting, had homered in the at-bat immediately before. They are still the only teammates to hit home runs in their first major league plate appearances in the same game. Yankees 8, Rays 4.

The night before, in the same series, Alex Rodriguez played his final game for the Yankees, a 6-3 win over the same opponent in the same building. PSA has graded 25 copies of that ticket and not one has ever come to public auction in the data we track. Twenty-four hours later, 588 copies and 50 sales. What collectors saved was not the better game; it was the game that turned out to matter.

There is no stub, so the usual premium does not exist

PSA's report holds no stub of this game at all. All 588 copies are full tickets in two prints, the stadium issue (461 graded) and the box office issue (125), plus two uncut panels. Modern MLB tickets are scanned at the gate rather than torn, so the complete ticket is the ordinary survivor for a 2016 game, not the scarce one. That removes the format premium we measured across the hobby in full ticket versus stub, and it is the structural reason a Judge debut is priced like a card and a Mickey Mantle debut is not.

A GEM MT 10 is the grade collectors chase everywhere else because it is close to unobtainable on paper, which is the argument in why a GEM MT 10 ticket is nearly impossible. Here there are 116 of them, and eight have sold unsigned, from $330 to $1,320, at a median of $441. You can check both prints on PSA's report, the stadium ticket and the box office ticket, or open the group in our population database.

A signature is worth more than five grade points

Signed, PSA EX 5, $1,769

Unsigned, PSA GEM MT 10, $640.50

Split the 50 sales by whether the ticket carries an autograph and the market divides cleanly. Ten signed lots have sold, for $312 to $6,405, a median of $1,316. The other 40 sold unsigned for $26 to $1,320, a median of $157. Signed copies are 20% of the sales and 59% of the money, and the five highest prices on record are all signed. The record itself, $6,405 at Heritage in April 2026, is a PSA 10 with a PSA/DNA 10 signature, cert 137074056. Its twin, cert 137074055, carries the same two 10s and has never been offered.

Eighty-nine consecutive certs, every one Authentic

Cert numbers run in sequence, so one submission occupies one block. Certs 63464621 to 63464710 are that block: 89 of those 90 numbers are Aaron Judge debut tickets in our reference, and every single one graded Authentic. Fifty-two are the stadium print, 37 the box office print. That is 89 of the 107 Authentic copies in existence, held by one person and graded at one time.

Ten of the 89 have reached auction, all through Goldin, one or two at a time across ten months. The first out made $622.20. The nine that followed averaged $153 and closed at $136.64. Seventy-nine are still unsold.

From $26 in 2018 to $216 in 2022, same ticket

Repeat sales of the identical encapsulated ticket are the only measurement that holds the object still. Exactly one Judge debut slab has two public results, and the gap between them is the clearest picture of what happened to this ticket between 2018 and 2022.

In May 2018 a PSA 8 Judge debut ticket was a $51 item and the PSA 7 beneath it made $26. Judge had two full seasons behind him and 52 rookie home runs. Four years later the same PSA 7 slab, no better and no worse, made $216 at Heritage, in a year when PSA 10s of the same ticket ran $330 to $1,320. No unsigned copy has beaten that $1,320 since, and it was set in January 2022.

Fifty sales, oldest to newest

The price on 11 August 2026

The last one to sell: cert 149715556, a PSA NM 7, at Heritage on 31 May 2026 for $378.20. Nothing has been offered in the ten weeks since. It is a useful benchmark precisely because it is unremarkable, an ordinary mid-grade copy of a ticket that exists 588 times over, and it landed $6 below the cheapest GEM MT 10 sold in the same two-year window.

Read together: an unsigned Judge debut ticket is a $100 to $650 item, and which end you land on is decided by the grade only at the very top. A signed one is a different market, four figures every time since January 2024, and the only version of this ticket that has ever produced a serious price. The $1,320 paid for an unsigned PSA 10 in January 2022 is still the high-water mark for a ticket without an autograph, four and a half years and 116 GEM MT 10s later.

The supply that sets those prices is not finished arriving either. Seventy-nine tickets from the 89-cert Authentic submission have never been offered, and neither has the second PSA 10 with a 10 signature. Judge's own numbers keep growing; the number of his debut tickets does too, and one of those two facts is holding the other down.