The Front Row Auctions results are in, every lot sold and a hockey ticket set a record

Every figure here is read from Front Row's own closing results for all 203 lots, taken the morning after the auction ended, with the 20% buyer's premium added so each price compares directly with the rest of our sold archive, 47,889 graded ticket sales from October 1991 to today across Heritage, Goldin, REA, Lelands, Fanatics Collect, eBay and the smaller houses. 168 of the 203 lots link to a PSA catalogue item, which is how we found what each ticket last sold for; the other 35 are multi-ticket lots, non-PSA slabs or items PSA has not catalogued, and were checked by hand where they mattered. Grades are PSA's, read from each cert, not from the lot title. 190 lots were PSA-graded, 4 BGS, 1 SGC and 8 did not state a grader.

Sold, 203 of 203

No lot went unsold. Every one of the 203 had a bid, none carried a reserve, and 198 of them drew more than one bidder; the five that sold at their opening bid had one. The whole sale took 5,146 bids, a median of 22 per lot. The hammer total of $460,412 was 6.3 times the opening bids added together ($72,995), and the median lot closed at 5.4 times its opening bid. The top lot opened at $25,000 and closed at $210,005 before premium, 8.4 times its start.

The most contested lot was not the most expensive one. The Vince Carter "Dunk of Death" stub from Sydney 2000, PSA 3 and the only graded stub of the game, took 85 bids on its way to $4,440. The 10-Cent Beer Night ticket took 82, the Michael Jordan first-dunk stub 76, and the Gretzky debut 74. Bidding depth ran through the whole catalogue: the 38 lots that closed under $100 still drew a median of six bids each.

Total, $552,495

Lot 1, the full ticket to Wayne Gretzky's professional debut for the Indianapolis Racers on 14 October 1978, PSA 2 and the only full ticket to the game PSA has graded, closed at $252,006. That is the highest price ever paid for a hockey ticket in our records, ahead of the $158,600 a PSA 9 stub from his NHL debut made at Heritage in October 2025, and the tenth-highest price for any graded ticket in the 47,889 sales we hold. The only prior sale of any ticket to the game was the stub, $18,000 at Heritage in August 2019. This lot alone is 45.6% of the auction.

Take the Gretzky ticket out and the other 202 lots made $300,489, an average of $1,488 each. The ten highest prices account for 74.6% of the total. For scale, the whole graded ticket market we track, every house together, took in less than this one auction in five of the previous thirteen months (September 2025, November 2025, January, July and September 2026). A house holding its first sale now has the largest single auction of graded tickets in our October figures by a wide margin.

The top ten, against the last price each ticket made

Four of the ten highest prices were for tickets with no prior public sale in any grade or form, so there was nothing to compare them against. Three of the ten beat every earlier sale of their ticket. Three closed below a recent sale of a comparable copy. The column on the right is the most useful one in the post: it is what the same ticket, or the nearest copy of it, made the last time it was offered.

The Frank Robinson debut stub is the clearest example of a price being set from nothing. Opening Day 1956, Redlegs against Cardinals, PSA 1.5, one of six graded. No copy of the ticket had ever sold in public that we can find. It opened at $5,300 on the first day of bidding and closed at $22,200 on 71 bids, the fourth-highest price in the sale. The next copy to come to market now has a reference.

The Bird and Jeter fulls show the other direction, and both were within reach of their comparables. The Bird is the exact slab that made $79,200 at Goldin in May 2022 and $19,520 at Goldin in June 2025; at $22,320 it is 14% above its last sale and well under the $35,380 a PSA 3 made at Heritage in August. The Jeter is one of three PSA 9 fulls. Another of the three sold for $31,200 in August 2022 and $23,180 in May 2026; this one made $21,120, 9% under the May price.

Records, 19 tickets sold for more than ever before

We counted a record when a lot closed above every prior public sale of the same ticket in our archive, in any grade and any form. 19 lots did. Five of them are in the top twenty by price, and those five are the ones that move a reference: the Brown debut, the Jordan dunk, the Thorpe game, the 1912 World Series opener and the Vikings' first game. The other fourteen are tickets that had sold once or twice before for a few hundred dollars or less and did better here.

The Jim Brown NFL debut stub, Browns against Giants on 29 September 1957, PSA 1 with a Mint 9 autograph, closed at $32,520, the second-highest price in the sale. The most anyone had paid in public for a ticket to that game was $7,320 for an unsigned PSA 3 at Goldin in May 2022, so this is 4.4 times the prior record. The signature is the difference: every other sale of the ticket we hold is unsigned, and this one became the highest price for a signed football ticket in the auction by a distance.

Thorpe, 1911, $9,936

1912 World Series, $5,642

One caution on the Tarkenton stub: the $976 is the prior high for a single stub. A pair of stubs from the same game made $2,019 at Goldin in December 2024, so per ticket the new price is roughly 3.7 times the pair and 3.8 times the single. And the Cats multiple is real but says more about the $18 than the $720: a PSA 2 of a Broadway preview ticket on eBay three years ago was not a market.

Last sale versus this sale, lot by lot

Two totals answer whether a new house inflated prices or matched them. First, the exact same slabs. 14 lots carried a cert number that had sold before. The last sale of each of those 14 added up to $27,471; at Front Row they made $32,558, 18.5% more, with seven up, one level and six down. Second, the same ticket in any copy. 91 lots had a prior public sale of the same catalogue item. The most recent sale of each adds up to $178,681; the 91 lots made $174,959 here, 2.1% less, with 44 above their last sale and 47 below. A new room with three weeks of bidding priced tickets with a history within 2% of where the rest of the market last put them.

The Bird full is the slab with the most history in the sale and the one that carries most of the same-slab total. Three sales in four years, $79,200, $19,520, $22,320: the 2022 figure was the top of that market and the two since are where the ticket has settled. Below it the table is mostly small tickets, and the movement is noise around a few hundred dollars either way, with one real fall. The World Trade Center observatory full made $549 at Goldin in January and $72 here; the same ticket type exists in quantity and PSA has graded many.

First public prices, 68 tickets

68 of the 168 catalogued lots were tickets with no public sale on record in any grade or form, and they took $338,148 of the total, $86,142 without the Gretzky. Most of them are small: the median first price was $270, and 17 of the 68 made $1,000 or more. 49 lots in the sale read population 1 with none higher on PSA's cert page, and the median price for those was also $270. A specialist house lists these one at a time where a general catalogue would group or decline them, and the closing price on each becomes the first comparable for its ticket.

Montana debut, $11,760

Dorsett debut, $4,800

The 10-Cent Beer Night ticket is the odd one in the top ten. It is graded by Beckett, not PSA, so it carries no PSA population and sits outside PSA's catalogue, and no ticket to the game has sold in public before. It took 82 bids, the second most in the sale, and closed at $19,500. A riot and a forfeit on 4 June 1974 now have a price, and it is higher than any Frank Robinson, Montana or Sayers debut in the same catalogue.

Buyer's premium, $92,082

Front Row charged 20% on every lot, so of the $552,495 paid, $92,082 is premium on a hammer total of $460,412. That is the low end of the houses we track: Goldin charges 20% to 22%, REA 23% and Heritage 25%. The premium, plus whatever a consignor pays, is the house's income from the sale, and it is what pays for the photography, the cataloguing and the marketing that put 203 tickets in front of bidders for three weeks. A ticket-only house only works if enough money moves through it to fund that, and $92,082 on a first sale is a working start. More of it means more lots photographed properly, more catalogues in front of people who have never bid on a ticket, and more liquidity for anyone who wants to sell one.

What the first Front Row auction says about the market

Everything sells in a room built for it. 203 of 203, including 38 lots that closed under $100 and still drew a median of six bids. General houses do not list a $24 ticket on its own; a specialist does, and found a buyer for each one.

The money is in debuts and firsts. Six of the top ten are debuts (Gretzky, Brown, Bird, Robinson, Jeter, Montana), one is a first dunk and the other three are famous games. Of the nineteen records, the five that matter are all a first or a famous game, and the two largest no-history prices are a professional debut and an MLB debut.

Prices with a history held, they did not inflate. 91 lots with a prior sale of the same ticket came in 2.1% under the sum of their most recent sales, 44 above and 47 below. The 14 exact repeat slabs came in 18.5% above, led by the Bird full. A first-time house whose results land on top of the rest of the market is a house whose prices can be used as comparables.

A signature changed one price and not many others. The Jim Brown debut stub sold for 4.4 times the unsigned record with a Mint 9 autograph. Across the 12 signed lots the median was $435, against $306 for the sale, and the Mariano Rivera signed debut stub made $6,960 against $31,200 for another signed copy in January 2022. The premium for a signature depends on who signed and how the ticket was graded, not on the signature alone.

Tickets are still a sports market. The 46 music, entertainment, political, historical and annual-pass lots made $22,786 between them, a median of $347, and the most expensive music ticket in the sale, the Grateful Dead at Cornell in 1977, was $1,980. They sold, every one, but the bidders who pay five figures are buying sport.

Fresh material reaches a specialist house first. The Montana and Dorsett debuts were graded together after PSA's July census and came straight to this sale. The Frank Robinson debut had never been offered in public. 68 tickets have a public price today that had none on Saturday, and the next copy of each one to surface has a number to be measured against.

The Jordan first-dunk stub, his second NBA game on 27 October 1984, PSA 4 with one graded higher, closed at $12,812 on 76 bids against a prior high of $7,653 for a PSA 2. It is the kind of ticket this sale was good at: a known moment, a small population, a grade above the last one sold, and three weeks in front of every ticket collector at once. We previewed this auction three days into bidding and profiled the founders in August; the results are what they set out to produce.

This is also the case for keeping all of it in one place. The comparables in this post came from Heritage, Goldin, REA, Lelands, Fanatics Collect and eBay, and the populations from PSA's cert pages, because that is how spread out a ticket's record is. Front Row prints the PSA cert number in its lot descriptions, so 167 of these 203 lots open straight into our scan index with the census and every prior sale beside them, and all 203 closing prices are in the sold archive as of this morning. A bidder who could see that the Bird full last made $19,520, or that no Frank Robinson debut had ever sold, bid with that in hand. That is better for the house, better for the consignor, and better for the next person who finds one of these tickets in a drawer.