Front Row Auctions is opening the hobby's first ticket-only auction house

Every auction house that sells graded tickets today sells other things too. Tickets are a department inside a catalogue built around cards and game-used memorabilia, and they are catalogued, described and valued by people whose main market is something else. Front Row is the first house to do tickets and nothing else. Its own description is the hobby's first ticket-centric marketplace, and what follows comes from its site, from the announcement episode of Stub Luv Live, and from interviews the founders gave to cllct and Sports Collectors Digest.

The three collectors behind it

Howard Citron is a managing partner at the Florida law firm LaCava Jacobsen and Goodis, and he hosts the ticket show Stub Luv Live. He collects by event rather than by player or sport, and by his own description he goes after incredible stories. He is also the one who has been making the public argument that the category was overdue a house of its own: photography, hockey memorabilia and golf all have specialist auctions catering to a specific collector, and tickets did not. He has said he was the difficult one of the three on the planning calls, because he wanted the process settled before a single lot went up.

Shaun Dougherty collects near Seattle and is the person a lot of ticket collectors already call. He answers messages, at length, from people he has never met, on the reasoning that you never know who you are talking to. That habit is the whole pitch, because the two questions he gets asked most are where do you find these and where should I sell mine. He has watched collectors struggle to get a large house to engage with an item that is not eye-catching enough, and Front Row exists to be the house that picks up.

Ryan Hotchkiss came out of pre-war cards, where he assembled the full 524-card T206 set and registered it before retiring it in the PSA registry. He sold most of that collection over the past two years and found he could not bid on cards he had just sold at prices he had helped set, so he went looking for the nearest thing. He had wanted a Jackie Robinson debut ticket for years and had been outbid on several. He bought one in 2025 and has bought tickets almost exclusively since. He calls himself a collector and an investor, he raised the idea of a ticket house with Dougherty out of the blue, and he wrote the mission statement.

Between them they cover the country. Citron is in South Florida, Dougherty is in the Seattle area and Hotchkiss is in Maryland, which means a consignor with something valuable enough that they would rather not post it can hand it to one of the three in person. They plan to be at shows through the year for the same reason.

Why a house only for tickets

Hotchkiss makes the case as a card collector. The jump is smaller than it looks: many of the tickets he has bought are 1919 World Series, Ruth, Cobb, Gehrig, the same pre-war names on the cards he sold, in roughly the same physical size, sitting in the same flips. They are rarer than the cards and they cost less. And they can be collected in an unlimited number of ways, which is what he thinks will keep people in once they arrive. Every game of DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. Every start Koufax made. All three home runs Michael Jordan hit in his professional baseball career. A four-night Hendrix run at the Fillmore in 1968.

Citron makes the case differently, and more simply. A card is a picture of the moment. The ticket was in the building. When a 1952 Topps Mantle in a mid grade sells for six figures, his point is that the ticket from the day Mantle actually walked out at Yankee Stadium tells the true story of it, and nothing else in the hobby does that except game-used material that almost nobody can buy.

The top of the market already agrees with them. The two highest ticket prices ever paid came in the same Heritage sale in February 2022: $480,000 for Jackie Robinson's MLB debut stub, graded PSA 2, and $468,000 for the only graded full ticket to Michael Jordan's NBA debut. You can pull the Jordan cert up in our scan index or read its group in the population database.

What they have committed to

The mission statement is "bringing the physical memories of our most meaningful events to market and advancing collectibles as an enjoyable and investable alternative asset class", under five stated values: honesty, integrity, fairness, transparency and value.

Dougherty set out three specific differences on the announcement show. A reply at every price level, including the $100 consignment a large house has little reason to answer. Ticket specialists rather than memorabilia generalists, on the argument that an expert valuing a ticket outside their own market is a problem collectors see constantly. And growing the category rather than harvesting it, which is why they have said they will take the middle of the market and not only the trophies. The published terms match that: bidding rises in $10 steps at the bottom of the ladder, and the buyer's premium carries a $20 minimum, which only matters on lots under $100.

Two other promises are worth holding them to. Citron has said listings will carry video, on the reasoning that a ticket to a moment people have watched a thousand times should be presented with the footage of it. And the catalogue is not limited to sport: concert, movie, political and inauguration tickets are all in scope, with specialised sales on MLB debuts and soccer planned once the schedule settles at three to four auctions a year.

The gap they are aiming at

Dougherty's second question, where should I sell mine, has a measurable answer. Across the 17,610 graded ticket sales we track, the median price is $312 and 77% of lots sell for under $1,000, so the bulk of this market is exactly the size of consignment that is hardest to get a large house to engage with. And most of what exists has never been sold in public at all: PSA has catalogued 70,161 distinct ticket items, and only 5,537 of them have an auction result in our archive.

Front Row lots will run in our auctions section

We compile live listings and sold results from Heritage, Goldin and Fanatics Collect into our auctions section. Front Row joins that list from its first sale, curated by us, so its lots sit beside the rest of the market rather than in a silo of their own. Where a lot carries a PSA cert it links straight into our scan index and population database, so a Front Row ticket can be checked against every other graded example of the same item and every price one has ever fetched.