The Jackie Robinson debut ticket now sells once a year, and never below $300,000

Six public sales of the 15 April 1947 stub are on record, and they split cleanly in two. The four sold with a number on the PSA label all cleared $300,000, topping out at the $480,000 record. The two sold as PSA Authentic made $20,400 and $40,800, and both predate every numeric sale. Prices here come from the auction data we compile from Heritage, Goldin and Fanatics Collect, August 2017 to December 2025; the population was read live from PSA's report on 30 July 2026, when 14 copies existed.

The game was Opening Day at Ebbets Field, Tuesday 15 April 1947, in front of 26,623 people. Robinson played first base and batted second. He went 0-for-3, then in the seventh, with Brooklyn trailing 3-2, he laid down a sacrifice bunt; the throw to first hit him in the back, and Pete Reiser's double brought him round with the go-ahead run. Dodgers 5, Braves 3.

A market that clears one copy a year

One copy has changed hands in each of the last four years, which is unusual for a ticket with a population of 14. The record fell 37.5% in eighteen months, from $480,000 in February 2022 to $300,000 in August 2023, then recovered in two steps, +8% to $324,000 and +13% to $366,000. December 2025 was still 23.8% below the record, and the four numeric sales have a median of $345,000.

The grade on the label is not the variable

PSA FR 1.5 · $324,000

PSA VG 3 · $366,000

Rank the four numeric sales by grade and the prices refuse to follow. PSA 1.5 made $324,000. PSA 2 made $480,000. PSA 3 made $300,000, then $366,000. The highest price on record went to the middle grade, and the single finest copy ever offered, the lone PSA 3, has never beaten it. Nothing in this population grades above PSA 4, so every buyer is choosing between low grades and pricing something else: the date on the ticket. It is the pattern we found across the whole market in why the most valuable graded ticket we track is only a PSA 2.

The two PSA Authentic sales sit far below at $20,400 and $40,800, but they are not evidence that Authentic is worth a tenth of a number. Both happened before any numeric copy was offered, in August 2017 and February 2021, and no Authentic copy has been offered since. Four of the six Authentic slabs have never come to auction at all, so the gap between the tiers is untested at current prices.

One slab has sold twice, and it is the only six-figure ticket that has

Cert 75815539 is the only PSA 3 of the debut stub in existence. It sold at Heritage in August 2023 for $300,000 and again at Goldin in December 2025 for $366,000, up 22% in two years and three months with no change to the slab. Across the 28 sales at or above $100,000 in our entire sales record, this cert is the only one that appears twice.

A repeat sale is the only measurement in this market that holds the object still. Every other comparison mixes grades, formats and condition; this one changes nothing but the date, and it puts the moment's appreciation at roughly 9% a year through a stretch when the headline record was falling. Both results also sit below the $480,000 set in 2022, so the record and the trend are pointing in different directions.

Fourteen copies, and the two best have never been offered

This is cert 63669866, the second PSA 1.5. Its twin sold for $324,000. This one has never been offered in any sale we track. It is one of nine copies in that position, and the two above it matter most: the only PSA 4, which is the finest example in existence, and the only PSA 1. Whatever the top of this market is worth has therefore never been tested, because the best copy has never been for sale.

We hold 6 of the 14 in our scans database, each with its cert number, grade and PSA slab image, and you can check the group against PSA's own report or our population database. There is also no full ticket to chase. Every one of the 14 is a stub, and PSA's 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers full-ticket set holds two items, neither of them 15 April. That removes the format premium a complete ticket normally carries, which we measured across the hobby in full ticket versus stub and which produced the $468,000 Michael Jordan debut full ticket. For Robinson the stub is the whole market.

One game takes 85% of the money

Away from the debut, Robinson is an inexpensive collectable. The median graded Robinson ticket sells for $635, and 121 of the 174 results, 70%, are under $1,000. The most expensive ticket that is not the debut is $32,400, paid at Heritage in November 2022 for a PSA 6 stub from the 11 April 1947 exhibition against the Yankees, his first game in a Dodgers uniform, of which PSA has now graded two. His first career home run, at the Polo Grounds on 18 April 1947, has three graded copies and has sold twice, $25,200 in May 2024 and $18,000 in August 2021, both PSA Authentic. His first major league hit, two days after the debut, exists as a single PSA 4 that has never been offered.

Robinson has three debut tickets

The MLB debut is 21 times the college debut and 211 times the minor league debut, while being the least rare of the three. The 1946 Montreal ticket is the outlier worth knowing about: it is a full ticket, only two have been graded and both are Authentic, and the one sale on record is from November 2015, so the $2,270 figure is eleven years stale and tells you almost nothing about what it would make today. Scarcity on its own does not set a ticket price; the size of the moment does.

The room where the record was set

The $480,000 was not an isolated result. It was set in the same session as the $468,000 Jordan full ticket, the $108,000 Lou Gehrig Day stub, the $99,000 Tiger Woods professional debut and a $99,000 Jordan stub, across one weekend in February 2022. Four and a half years later the top two prices from that room are still the top two prices in the hobby. Anyone reading the $480,000 as the going rate is reading the high-water mark of the strongest weekend the market has had.

Where the price sits in July 2026

On the evidence: a numerically graded copy is a $300,000 to $370,000 ticket, and has been for three years, with the last result at $366,000 and the trend flat to slightly up. The $480,000 record is not the market, it is a February 2022 outlier that three subsequent sales have failed to reach. A PSA Authentic copy has no current price at all, since none has been offered since February 2021, when one made $40,800; four of the six exist and have never traded. Nothing has come to auction so far in 2026, and on the pattern of the last four years the next one is due.