./wave
Hey everyone, I'm Matt.
Good, now that the introductions are over, grab some popcorn, or get ready to take your post-lunch potty break, because like I said in the title, Ive got something that I am VERY VERY excited about to share with everyone.
I recently got back into collecting sports cards and memorabilia. While talking to my father one day, he tells me that he has three "old baseball cards, well, kind of baseball cards" that he had been holding on to and wanted me to look at. I am over at their apartment one day, and he brings these out in a jewelry box, wrapped in some newspaper. Three season tickets from 1869 and 1870. I immediately knew they were and are significant, but had no idea how significant these three tickets potentially are.
These have been in my family's possession since originally issued. My father's maternal line, the Curtis', emigrated from England in the early 1700s, and lived in the New York and New Jersey area well into the early - mid 1900s. My grandmother got these from the estate of her Great Aunt, and gave them to my father. The Curtis named on the front of the tickets is, without digging out my father's family tree research, is by my rough estimate, a 5x Great relative.
MY father told me that 15+ years ago he tried to have them researched and appraised, but the mass availability of information today is not what it was back then. All he could tell me, other than that they decided to just hold on to them, was that one of the tickets was from a team who eventually became a major league team. That was enough to spark my own research interest, so down the rabbit hole I went.
Of the three tickets, the ticket for the Union Baseball club, aka "The Troy Haymakers," is the most significant. While not a precursor to a current MLB team, they were indeed one of the original seven teams who broke away from the National Association in 1870 to found the National Association of *Proffesional* Baseball players. What is even more important about this particular ticket, is that in the season of 1869, the Haymakers were one of 12 teams to participate in the first ever official Pennant Race, making this a ticket to a team who played in (arguably) the first ever season of "professional sports."
At that point, The real kicker to the story came when I found this article ( which has been shared on here obviously!
). The gentleman found a season ticket dating from 1871-ish, to which the Cooperstown acknowledged was older than anything that they knew of, or had in their possession, as of 2011.
https://www.theday.com/state/2011051...setts-auction/
An excerpt from a textbook, Ticket Operations and Sales Management in Sports, pub. 2013, shows an image of, and lists a single game ticket to the Red Stockings on July 1st, 1869, now in the possession of Cooperstown as the oldest known baseball ticket.
https://fitpublishing.com/sites/defa...r_1excerpt.pdf
Given the information in the article and excerpt, and that because these are season tickets, they were likely (and also likely unprovably) printed at some point in the year BEFORE the ticket to the Red Stockings game mentioned above, I would like to posture that unless any other new, old, definitavely baseball GAME and not ball / dance / fundraiser / etc. tickets have emerged, that I have now located the new, oldest known tickets.
After finding that article and excerpt, and realizing that we potentially had the oldest known tickets, I actually got in touch with Cooperstown about possibly loaning these tickets for exhibition. Our offer was "graciously declined" as they said they did not have room currently, or plans in the near future to change the exhibits where a spot for these would open up.
So, in conclusion, I would like to present to you three of, if not THE, oldest known baseball tickets in existence.