Only one of Shohei Ohtani's sixteen debut tickets has a real market

On 19 April 2026 a GEM MT 10 full ticket from Shohei Ohtani's MLB debut sold at Fanatics Collect for $9,600 after 69 bids. On 9 August 2026, 112 days later, the same encapsulated ticket, cert 151560383, sold at the same auction house for $21,000 after 57 bids. Nothing about the slab changed in between. Every figure in this report comes from the 37 public sales of the 29 March 2018 game in the auction results we compile from Heritage, Goldin and Fanatics Collect, January 2022 to August 2026. Population counts were read from PSA in July 2026.

The game itself was low-key. Ohtani batted eighth as designated hitter on Opening Day at the Oakland Coliseum, singled through the right side on the first pitch he saw from Kendall Graveman, and finished 1-for-5 in a 6-5 Athletics win in 11 innings. The ticket that records it accounts for $194,273, or 41%, of the $470,106 spent across the 200 graded Ohtani ticket sales we track.

Four of the six repeat sales fell and the newest one doubled

A repeat sale of the identical slab is the only clean measurement available: the grade, the print and the object are all held fixed, and the only thing that moved is the date. Six Ohtani debut certs have sold at public auction more than once, a high proportion for a ticket with only 30 distinct certs traded, and they do not agree with each other.

Two of the six lost more than half their value, two gave back about a fifth, one gained 19% across three sales, and one more than doubled. The one that doubled is the most recent transaction on the board. Cert 68964243 is the useful middle case: it went through three auctions in eleven months, $3,600 at Heritage, then $2,928 at Goldin eight months later, then $4,270 at Goldin again. The same slab can lose 19% and then gain 46% inside a year with nothing happening to it.

Three years down, then a step up

The record still belongs to February 2022, when a box office GEM MT 10, cert 63560748, made $31,200 at Heritage, catalogued at the time as population three. Across all 37 sales the range runs from $372 to $31,200 with a median of $3,000. What that median hides is the shape: the 16 sales of 2022 total $100,992, the 15 sales spread across 2023 to 2025 total $39,899, and the six sales of 2026 so far total $53,381.

Evidence that the date now matters more than the label: this VG 3 box office full ticket, cert 126492184, took 21 bids at Goldin in January 2026 and closed at $2,989. That is more than any NM-MT 8 or NM 7 of this ticket has ever made, more than double the last NM-MT 8 result nine months earlier, and within $11 of the only GEM MT 10 sold in the whole of 2025.

The top grade is the commonest grade

PSA splits this one game across five separate catalogue entries, because the Coliseum put the night on five different pieces of stock. Together they come to 165 graded copies as of July 2026, and every single one is a full ticket. PSA's population report holds no stub of this game at all, which is why nothing in this article compares a full against a stub. You can check the box office group and the Athletics group on PSA, or search the same game in our population database.

Athletics print, $18 bleacher

Box office print, $51 field reserved

That distribution is the opposite of an old ticket's. 118 of the 165, or 72%, grade NM-MT 8 or better, and the top grade is the single most common one in the population. For comparison, PSA has graded 195 copies of the LeBron James debut and not one of them is a GEM MT 10. A 2018 ticket that was never torn, never pocketed and in many cases never used does not produce a scarce top grade. It produces 49 of them.

One 2026 submission put six GEM MT 10s into the market at once

PSA issues cert numbers in sequence, so tickets graded in the same submission carry consecutive numbers. Certs 151560380 through 151560385 are six unbroken numbers, all six graded GEM MT 10, and all six are this game. Four are box office prints; the other two are the comp variety, whose entire recorded population is two, so that one submission holds every comp variety in existence.

Their cert numbers sit above 151 million, which places the grading in 2026, seven years after every other slab in the sample. Two of the six have been sold so far, both at Fanatics Collect in April 2026: cert 151560380 at $8,400 and cert 151560383 at $9,600. Six fresh top-grade copies reaching the market at once is normally what caps a price. Four months later one of those same six resold for $21,000, and four of the six have still not been offered publicly.

His other fifteen debuts barely trade at all

No other player we track has this problem. Because Ohtani arrived twice, once in Japan and once in the majors, and because he pitches as well as hits, PSA's ticket catalogue records sixteen separate Ohtani debuts, from a February 2013 spring training game against the Hanshin Tigers to his World Series pitching debut in October 2025. Between them they account for 348 graded tickets, and the 29 March 2018 MLB debut is 165 of those 348. Only five of the sixteen have ever produced a public sale of a single ticket.

The largest cheque in Ohtani's ticket market did not buy one ticket. In March 2026 Goldin sold this pair for $125,660 after 30 bids, on a hammer of $103,000: the signed green season variety full ticket from the 29 March 2018 MLB debut, cert 111780219, beside the signed 2024 NLDS Game 1 postseason debut, cert 100886228. Both tickets grade GEM MT 10 with PSA/DNA GEM MT 10 autographs, and Goldin catalogued both as population one among signed examples. Unsigned, the green season print has 38 graded copies and has never sold on its own.

All 37 sales in one table

Putting a number on one today

A GEM MT 10 is an $8,400 to $21,000 ticket, and the top of that band is one sale old. Three have sold this year, at $8,400, $9,600 and $21,000, against a 2025 figure of $3,000. A buyer working from the last two comparables would start near $9,000 and a seller would point at the $21,000; the honest answer is that the August result is a single data point on a ticket with 49 copies at that grade, and the next one will settle it. What it is not is a return to the 2022 record. $21,000 is 67% of the $31,200 paid four and a half years ago.

The rest of the curve moved with it, not just the top. MINT 9 has run $4,682 to $6,710 in 2026, against $1,680 to $2,806 across the whole of 2023 to 2025. NM-MT 8 last sold for $1,464 and NM 7 for $1,920, both before the re-rating, and neither grade has been tested since. The VG 3 that made $2,989 in January outsold every NM-MT 8 and NM 7 result on record. On the current evidence the print matters about as much as the number: every 2026 sale above $8,000 was a box office ticket, and box office copies grade GEM MT 10 nearly three times as often as the Athletics print does.

The parts of the population that have never been priced are the low grades, not the high ones. Nothing at EX-MT 6, EX 5, VG-EX 4, PR 1 or FR 1.5 has ever been offered at public auction, which is 24 of the 165 copies. Ohtani's other fifteen debut tickets are almost entirely untraded too: eleven of them have no public sale at all, and the NPB pitching debut from May 2013, at 35 graded copies, has produced exactly one result above $4,000. For where the wider debut market sits, the Michael Jordan first game ticket reached $468,000 and a LeBron James debut ticket now sells for a fifth of its 2021 peak.