The Front Row Auctions inaugural auction is selling tickets the market has never priced

Three days into the Front Row Auctions inaugural auction, lot 1 stood at $86,000 on 45 bids. It is a full ticket to Wayne Gretzky's professional debut, Indianapolis Racers against Winnipeg Jets on 14 October 1978, graded PSA 2. PSA's census shows one full ticket for that game and this is it. No full ticket to the game appears anywhere in the sales we track. The auction closes on 11 October, so that price has three weeks left to run.

All 203 lots are in our auctions section alongside every other house we track, and we checked each one against our sold archive of 32,105 graded ticket sales, 1991 to September 2026. Bids and bid counts below were read on 20 September 2026 and will move. Front Row shows bids before its 20% buyer's premium, and every price in our archive includes the premium, so wherever a bid sits beside a past sale we print the bid with the premium added. Population figures are PSA's census as of 8 July 2026 and PSA's cert pages as read this month.

The top lot has no price history, and the hockey record is in range

The nearest comparable to lot 1 is the stub from the same game. One sold at Heritage in August 2019 for $18,000, described then as the only one graded. Since that sale the Gretzky market has been repriced. The PSA 9 stub from his NHL debut a year later made $11,400 at REA in November 2020 and the same slab made $158,600 at Heritage in October 2025, which is the highest price for a hockey ticket in our archive. A PSA 8 of that stub followed at $88,450 in March 2026.

With the premium, the standing bid on the debut full is $103,200. If the auction ended today it would already be the second-highest hockey ticket price we hold. It needs a bid of about $132,200 to pass $158,600 all-in. Front Row also has the only graded stub from the Racers' intersquad game three weeks before the debut, Gretzky's earliest known professional appearance, PSA 3, opened at $3,500. It has no sale on record either.

Six of the thirteen highest bids are on tickets that have never sold in public

A sold archive can only price a ticket that has sold. For these lots it has nothing, because no copy of the ticket in any grade or form appears in it. The closing price on 11 October becomes the first public price for each of them, and the reference every later sale is measured against.

The Jim Brown lot belongs beside them for a different reason. His NFL debut stub has sold before, unsigned, and the highest price on record is $7,320 for a PSA 3 at Goldin in May 2022. Front Row's copy is signed, with the autograph graded Mint 9, and stood at $20,100 on 44 bids, $24,120 with the premium. That is already more than three times the most anyone has paid in public for a ticket to that game.

24 lots are the only graded example, and most of them are bid under $200

We counted a lot as the only graded example when two readings agree: PSA's census lists one copy of that ticket, and the lot's own cert page reads population 1 with none higher. 24 lots pass, and 19 of those stood under $200. For 18 of them PSA has graded no other form of the event either, so the slab in the auction is the entire graded record of that day. A wider group of 44 lots read population 1 at their grade with none higher, meaning nothing better is known.

The Gretzky debut is the only one of the 24 priced in five figures. The rest are where a specialist house earns its keep: these are tickets a general sports catalogue would bundle or decline, listed here one at a time with the population stated.

Where a ticket has sold before, the bids are still under the last price

Ten lots are slabs we have watched sell before. The one with the most history is the Larry Bird NBA debut full ticket, PSA 1.5. This exact slab made $79,200 at Goldin in May 2022 and $19,520 at Goldin in June 2025. PSA lists five full tickets. Since the 2025 sale a PSA 3 has made $35,380 at Heritage, in August 2026. The bid here was $9,350, or $11,220 with the premium, which is 57% of what the same slab made fifteen months ago.

That gap is normal for the first week of a three-week auction, and it is the useful part of this table. The last column is not a forecast. It is what the most recent comparable sales say the ticket is worth, which is the number a bidder should have in mind while the clock still has weeks on it.

The Jeter debut full is the cleanest read in the sale. PSA has graded three full tickets, all PSA 9. One sold on eBay in 2016 for $3,556. A second has sold twice, for $31,200 in 2022 and $23,180 four months ago. Front Row's is the third and has no sale on record, which means two of the three known copies will have been offered in public inside six months. The 1912 World Series full is the opposite case: it sold thirteen months ago and the bid has already passed that price.

One house for tickets should mean higher prices and clearer information

Until this month a graded ticket went to auction as a few lots inside a catalogue of several thousand cards and jerseys. The comparables in the tables above come from Heritage, Goldin, REA and Lelands because that is how spread out one ticket's price history is. A bidder had to know to look in all of them, and a consignor with a $150 ticket that happens to be the only one graded had nowhere that would list it on its own.

Front Row changes both halves of that. The material is here because there is now a house built to take it: 76 tickets with no public price, 24 sole examples, concert, political and Olympic tickets next to the sports lots, and 162 of the 203 lots opening at $100 or less. And the buyers are in one room. 179 of the 203 lots had a bid within three days, and the top lot drew 45. When every serious ticket collector is watching the same 203 lots, each one gets bid by the people who know what it is, which is how prices get found properly and how records get broken. We profiled the three founders in August; this catalogue is what they said they would build.

It is the same argument we make for Collectors Tools. Information about tickets has been scattered across auction archives, PSA's population report and collectors' own spreadsheets, and scattered information makes cautious bidders. Front Row agreed to print the PSA cert number in its lot descriptions, so most of its lots open straight into our scan index and population database, with the census and every past sale one click away. A buyer who can see that a ticket is one of three and last sold for $23,180 bids with more confidence than one who is guessing. More confident bidding on more visible lots is good for every collector who owns a ticket, whichever house they sell through.