A Ken Griffey Jr. debut ticket stub has never sold above $20,400

Oakland printed the ticket for a Monday night game its own box office called Opening Night, 8:05 PM at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, Athletics 3 Mariners 2 in front of 46,000. Batting second and playing centre field was a 19-year-old Ken Griffey Jr., who doubled off Dave Stewart in his first major league at-bat. Thirty-seven years later that stub is a $6,700 to $13,500 item unsigned, and about half again as much with his signature on it. Everything below comes from all 17 public sales on record, drawn from the sold data we compile from Goldin, Heritage and Fanatics Collect, May 2021 to May 2026, and from a live PSA population read on 11 August 2026.

PSA runs two population reports for this ticket

Griffey is alive, he signs, and PSA/DNA will certify a signature on the ticket itself. So a Griffey debut stub is catalogued twice over: once as a plain ticket and once, on a separate report, as a dual-graded slab carrying both a ticket grade and an autograph grade. Quote one report and you are describing less than two thirds of what exists.

The finest copy in existence is a signed PSA 7, and there is one. Behind it sit two signed PSA 6s and one unsigned PSA 6, cert 63816666. None of those four has ever been offered, so the top of this market has never been publicly priced. Fifteen different certified copies have sold at least once, which leaves seventeen that have not. You can open the group on PSA's own report or in our population database.

The $52,460 record is the only complete ticket

A bleacher ticket, face value $3.50, still carrying its audit stub, signed across the face and graded PSA VG 3 with a PSA/DNA GEM MT 10 autograph. It sold at Goldin on 29 December 2024 for $52,460, hammering at $43,000 after 47 bids, more than any other lot in this market has drawn. It is the one complete ticket from the game on either PSA report, with none graded higher. Every other copy that survives was torn at a turnstile.

That is 2.6 times the best stub ever sold and 24% of all the money spent on this ticket in six years. It is also the one result in the record that cannot be repeated on demand: a second complete ticket would have to surface first, and none has in the 37 years since the game.

Seventeen sales in five years

Seventeen sales, $222,277 in total, a median of $9,600, a floor of $3,840 and a ceiling of $52,460. Set that against every Ken Griffey Jr. ticket we track, 96 sales worth $263,917 since April 2013, and the debut accounts for 84% of the money from 18% of the sales. Away from it Griffey is an inexpensive collectable: the median graded Griffey ticket sells for $309, and the cheapest on our record went for $14.50.

Seven signed sales have matched nine unsigned ones

Seven signed stubs have sold at a median of $11,700 against $7,800 for the nine unsigned, so ink is worth roughly half again on the same piece of card. The premium is not automatic. The signed PSA 4 that sold in May 2026 made $8,550, less than the unsigned PSA 4 that made $13,542 eleven months earlier, and the cheapest signed sale on record, $8,540 for a PSA Authentic in August 2025, is beaten by four unsigned results.

The best signed stub on record. Upper reserved, face value $3.50, section 321, signed in blue across the face and graded PSA EX 5 with a GEM MT 10 autograph. It made $17,080 at Goldin in September 2024 on 35 bids. Three signed stubs grade higher than this one, two PSA 6s and the PSA 7, and not one of the three has been to auction.

The dearest unsigned copy is the second-lowest graded one

PSA issues one grade below this. A field level stub, face value $10.00, graded PSA FR 1.5, sold at Goldin in January 2022 for $20,400 on 41 bids. Two PSA 3s have since sold for $7,800 and $6,710, and a PSA 4 for $13,542. Buyers here are paying for the date, not the corners.

Read the unsigned sales in date order and the grade barely registers. Three results sit outside the pack: the $20,400 above, a PSA Authentic at $3,840 in December 2022, and a PSA 4 at $13,542 in June 2025. The other six, spread across four grades and five calendar years, every one of them landed between $6,710 and $9,600.

The only slab to sell twice went down

Cert 53379988 is a PSA VG 3 with an NM-MT 8 autograph, and Heritage has sold it twice. It made $15,000 in May 2021 and $12,600 in August 2022, a 16% fall in fifteen months with nothing about the slab changed. Holding the object constant is the cleanest read available on direction, and it points the same way as the last two years of results. The lot titles also record what changed around it: in 2021 Heritage advertised the slab as highest graded, and by 2022 the same slab was one higher. Somebody had a better one certified in between.

Everything else from 1989 is scarcer and cheaper

A week after the debut, on 10 April 1989, Griffey took the first pitch he ever saw at the Kingdome and hit it over the left field wall off Eric King of the White Sox. PSA has graded 27 copies of that stub, against 32 of the debut. It has sold six times, for $285 to $2,520, a median of $1,317. Near-identical rarity, one seventh the price.

The bottom row is the whole lesson in one line. A ticket with a graded population of one, the only copy PSA has ever seen, sold for $55. Rarity is not what this market pays for. The date printed on the ticket is.

Buying a Ken Griffey Jr. debut ticket in 2026

What $13,542 bought in June 2025: an unsigned PSA VG-EX 4, upper reserved, face value $7.00, one of six unsigned copies tied at that grade. No unsigned copy above PSA 4 has ever been offered, so a 4 is realistically the top of what a buyer can go out and get.

The two most recent results are $8,550 in May 2026 for a signed PSA 4 and $6,710 in February 2026 for an unsigned PSA 3, and both sit inside the band the last four years have set. On the record: an unsigned mid-grade stub is a $6,700 to $9,600 ticket, a PSA 4 has reached $13,542, a signed stub carries roughly 50% more than its unsigned equivalent, and PSA Authentic is the discount tier at $3,840 to $8,540 depending on whether it is signed. The $52,460 record is not a benchmark for any of that, because the complete ticket it bought is the only one there is.