The Sad Demise of the Ticket

[CT Pirate]

Dating back to the 70's - I have many Setonia ticket stubs. I read how all you season ticket holders anxiously await the ticket delivery and envy living two and half hours away in CT. Sadly physical tickets are going away. I penned a piece about this how this hurts.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sad-demise-ticket-bill-field/

If you're a certain age like me (Setonia grad in 78) you'll relate. Would love to hear
what you value and cherish the most from your ticket stub collection - that is if you can find them!

 

[Halldan1]

I have a replica FF ticket encased in fiberglass in my man cave.

I have a seasons worth of tickets with individual FF players pictured on each ticket. I have glued them to a shelf and put SHU FF memorabilia on that shelf.

I also have my Media Pass from the Whitehead Big East game against Nova on my SHU wall.

 

[STLPirate12]

I definitely see it, and those sentimental items / collectables is one the top complaints about mobile tickets. This is expecially true regarding milestone events. Teams now offer ticket holders the opportunity to buy commemoritve tickets after the fact for milestone event games, but it's not the same.

Ultimately, mobile tickets are winning out for 3 reasons: Money, security, data.

 

[TheHall87]

I definitely see it, and those sentimental items / collectables is one the top complaints about mobile tickets. This is expecially true regarding milestone events. Teams now offer ticket holders the opportunity to buy commemoritve tickets after the fact for milestone event games, but it's not the same.

Ultimately, mobile tickets are winning out for 3 reasons: Money, security, data.

This day has been coming for a while.

I'd add to your list that it's one fewer thing for people to physically handle in the COVID era. I think it's accelerated the process.

 

[STLPirate12]

This day has been coming for a while.

I'd add to your list that it's one fewer thing for people to physically handle in the COVID era. I think it's accelerated the process.

That's definitely a benefit of it. I think it certainly gives those teams who wanted to go fully mobile but were afraid of fan pushback an easy excuse to sell their fans on and get it done.

 

[CT Pirate]

I have a replica FF ticket encased in fiberglass in my man cave.

I have a seasons worth of tickets with individual players pictured on each ticket. I have glued them to a shelf and put SHU memorabilia on that shelf.

I also have my Media Pass from the Whitehead Big East game against Nova on my SHU wall.

Knew you would have lots of great ticket stuff. Brings back memories. I pulled out a collage out of the attic that we did for our son. I was fortunate to have a serious og great positions in the ad biz (probably because I worked hard) and we went to so many big games - from World Series to Ryder Cups. Now that i have to pay - I don't go nearly that many times if at all. Taking clients to the Legends Seats was obscene. The food was unbelievable. Plus $800 a seat. Thanks for your continued work with PirateCrew - it's appreciated and valued by this old Setonia dude.

 

[CT Pirate]

That's definitely a benefit of it. I think it certainly gives those teams who wanted to go fully mobile but were afraid of fan pushback an easy excuse to sell their fans on and get it done.

So true. Economics rules everything.

 

[sami]

I have the two tickets that my twins were on back when they did the fan photo promotion.

 

[lloyde dobler]

I gave my niece stubs from a SHU game on a Saturday afternoon that was going on while she was born.

 

[P615007]

Final four ticket stub encased is a great one of have. I have a rendition painting of the toppirate greats that was done back in 2003. Thai has wanzer regan Saul Mosley werkman dukes degree and Davies. It would be great to see a modern version of players post 1980 of the modern all time pirate greats,

 

[SHUSA]

i love tickets, but mobile tickets just make way too much sense

 

[thehall07]

Don’t worry you will be able to keep them in your digital wallet and NFTs will rule the world.

 

[metalpirate07]

Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated wrote a fabulous piece on this topic a few years ago.

I also have boxes of ticket stubs for games and concerts of all sorts over the years I need to organize into better displays/scrapbooks.

Digital tickets are far more practical but I love the stories physical tickets tell. A few years ago a friend of mine got Mets tickets from his boss last minute, so he asked me to go but it was so last minute we couldn’t make it out to Queens in time for the start of the game and ended up watching on tv as Johan Santana threw his no hitter.

Even though we weren’t at the game, My buddy had those tickets framed since it was still a physical memento.

I kept media guides and passes from games I worked at SHU and big time high school games like the Prime Time shootout showcase in Trenton where my team played in the game after St Vincent St Mary-Oak Hill. I grabbed all the ephemera I could that day because I thought those Lebron and Carmelo guys looked like special players so it would be some sweet memorabilia someday.

Digital NFTs just aren’t the same for me.

 

[lr591902]

I have an old varsity jacket which we refer to as the ticket coat. At one time it held the ticket from every sporting event I attended for about 15 years in the upper inside pocket. There were regional finals, World Series games, a super bowl and a multitude of basketball, baseball and football tickets in that pocket. I no longer wear the coat but cannot part with it or the memories.

 

[CT Pirate]

Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated wrote a fabulous piece on this topic a few years ago.

I also have boxes of ticket stubs for games and concerts of all sorts over the years I need to organize into better displays/scrapbooks.

Digital tickets are far more practical but I love the stories physical tickets tell. A few years ago a friend of mine got Mets tickets from his boss last minute, so he asked me to go but it was so last minute we couldn’t make it out to Queens in time for the start of the game and ended up watching on tv as Johan Santana threw his no hitter.

Even though we weren’t at the game, My buddy had those tickets framed since it was still a physical memento.

I kept media guides and passes from games I worked at SHU and big time high school games like the Prime Time shootout showcase in Trenton where my team played in the game after St Vincent St Mary-Oak Hill. I grabbed all the ephemera I could that day because I thought those Lebron and Carmelo guys looked like special players so it would be some sweet memorabilia someday.

Digital NFTs just aren’t the same for me.

Thanks. To be mentioned with Rushin - albeit in a passing mention.

 

[CT Pirate]

I have an old varsity jacket which we refer to as the ticket coat. At one time it held the ticket from every sporting event I attended for about 15 years in the upper inside pocket. There were regional finals, World Series games, a super bowl and a multitude of basketball, baseball and football tickets in that pocket. I no longer wear the coat but cannot part with it or the memories.

Post a pic. Would love to see it.

 

[BigEastPhil]

Dating back to the 70's - I have many Setonia ticket stubs. I read how all you season ticket holders anxiously await the ticket delivery and envy living two and half hours away in CT. Sadly physical tickets are going away. I penned a piece about this how this hurts.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sad-demise-ticket-bill-field/

If you're a certain age like me (Setonia grad in 78) you'll relate. Would love to hear
what you value and cherish the most from your ticket stub collection - that is if you can find them!

Great post ! Not having physical tickets is quite frustrating!

 

[MBF72]

Sophomore year at the Hall and living in Boland Hall. The dorm council sponsored a Mets game at Shea in late September... 1969! The dorm planned it in the spring. Well, it was the game vs. the Cardinals where the Mets wrapped up the newly-formed NL East crown. I've kept the ticket: box seat, $3.50. With the bus, the whole night was $5.00. (Were any posters, by chance, at that game as well?)

 

[mbraue]

Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated wrote a fabulous piece on this topic a few years ago.

I also have boxes of ticket stubs for games and concerts of all sorts over the years I need to organize into better displays/scrapbooks.

Digital tickets are far more practical but I love the stories physical tickets tell. A few years ago a friend of mine got Mets tickets from his boss last minute, so he asked me to go but it was so last minute we couldn’t make it out to Queens in time for the start of the game and ended up watching on tv as Johan Santana threw his no hitter.

Even though we weren’t at the game, My buddy had those tickets framed since it was still a physical memento.

I kept media guides and passes from games I worked at SHU and big time high school games like the Prime Time shootout showcase in Trenton where my team played in the game after St Vincent St Mary-Oak Hill. I grabbed all the ephemera I could that day because I thought those Lebron and Carmelo guys looked like special players so it would be some sweet memorabilia someday.

Digital NFTs just aren’t the same for me.

I saved my tickets to Wichita and Jacksonville NCAAs. Really sharp looking tickets - of course I love SHU tickets featuring different players each game.

 

[TheHall87]

I used to keep all my tickets and I still have the ticket from recent years. I tossed tons of them when I moved years ago but I may have kept my Final Four ticket stubs. I also have a set from the 1996 FF at the Meadowlands, which will probably go down as the last FF held in a regular-sized arena as opposed to a football stadium.

I also kept the media guides I picked up from my time at WSOU as well as old Mets and Nets programs. One that I remember, that I hope I kept after the aforementioned move, was from the 1986-87 season. On December 13, 1986 we played Rutgers at the Meadowlands in the first half of a doubleheader (a 109-81 thrashing, I remember I got to interview Chris Thorne of the Star-Ledger at halftime). The second game that night was Duke vs. Alabama.

What was notable to me is that Duke's basketball media guide was a hard bound volume book like a high school or college yearbook as opposed to the softbound guides that were typically handed out.

That book stood out to me as something I should keep. I don't believe I ever saw another college program hand out hardbound media guides.

 

[HallLine69]

Sophomore year at the Hall and living in Boland Hall. The dorm council sponsored a Mets game at Shea in late September... 1969! The dorm planned it in the spring. Well, it was the game vs. the Cardinals where the Mets wrapped up the newly-formed NL East crown. I've kept the ticket: box seat, $3.50. With the bus, the whole night was $5.00. (Were any posters, by chance, at that game as well?)

I vividly remember that night and that game. Who could have known what a historic night it would be. Wish I’d saved the ticket. I was an RA in “new” Boland Hall as a fifth year undergrad. We sat on the third base side and we ran onto the field at game’s end. There were many, many people on the field. I grabbed a handful of infield grass (not acceptable by today’s standards) and kept it in a plastic bag in my room for months. Don’t remember what I did with it eventually...maybe I smoked it. I remember they opened the center field gate and we left through it. People were sitting on top of the outfield walls. It was unbridled joy. Thanks for bringing up a wonderful memory.

 

[SHUSource]

I started keeping all my tickets from an early age - say 10. When the baseball strike in 1981 ended, I was at the Yankees' "second opening day game" against Texas - I want to say it was August 10. Just dumb luck - my mother had purchased the tickets through a Wayne Parks Department bus trip (she wouldn't drive to the Stadium) months before and that just happened to be where they resumed the schedule.

I had never been to an opening day (and only a handful of ballgames at all to that point) so this seemed like a ticket worth keeping. And so I just kept on doing it. Games, concerts, museums, movies - pretty much anything they make a ticket for, I kept it. It stopped being fun when print-at-home tickets started being a thing, but I still kept up with it for a while for archival purposes, but stopped doing that after a while. Just not as fun.

The most bittersweet pair of tickets I've got are unused and pristine, from one day in July when it was hot and humid as hell and I had blown my back out a couple weeks prior and just didn't think it was worth it to sit there and be miserably uncomfortable all afternoon just to see the Yankees play the Expos. It wound up being David Cone's perfect game. Whoops!

 

[SHallguy2]

i love tickets, but mobile tickets just make way too much sense

I purchased 4 yankee tickets on stub hub for day game vs rays the other day and was cursing digital tickets. I needed to link another app ball park to stub hub in order to email or text my tickets. Heads up if you purchase tickets and need to send them to friends driving in separately. Covid created a mess in the digital ticket world. No mention on stub hub when you purchase tickets about linking the ballpark app.

 

[BucBloc]

I have ticket stubs, programs and media guides from the late 70s to now. Masters, UsOpen golf and tennis, and plays concerts and games galore. I do look at them from time to time, enough to not throw them out. I Keep thinking to ask the university if the business school sports marketing department would have any interest in the books or if that is too far gone an era in today’s digital world. I have two artist daughters to whom I’ve offered the stubs to make something interesting out of. We will see how that plays out. Father’s Day is closing in. Again.

 

[STLPirate12]

I used to keep ticket stubs, but they'd only end up in a box or envelope and I'd forget about them until I find them cleaning up or something. More recently, they go into my pocket and are so mangled by the end of the game that I don't bother to save them anyway (with a few exceptions that I have made a point to take good care of: MLB All Star Game, World Series game, NHL All Star Game, Winter Classic, Stanley Cup Finals game). And reality is that the overwhelming majority of my "physical tickets" were print at home pdfs anyway. I don't miss those at all and since that is much of what's being replaced, I think digital/mobile tickets is absolutely the correct way to go. It's a huge improvement, IMO.

 

[hallstorm]

Digital tickets are far more practical but I love the stories physical tickets tell. A few years ago a friend of mine got Mets tickets from his boss last minute, so he asked me to go but it was so last minute we couldn’t make it out to Queens in time for the start of the game and ended up watching on tv as Johan Santana threw his no hitter.

This was one of the best games I’ve been to—and I’ve been a large number of playoff and World Series mets and yankee games. I’m a huge A’s fan and a very big Mets fan. Needless to say that due to geographic location, I go to about 8-10 Mets games a season and about 3-5 A’s games depending on when during the week Oakland plays the Yankees, Orioles and Redsox

I was considering framing the Johan ticket stub. For me, it holds a little extra special memory because it happened on what would have been my dad’s 75th birthday and bled over into my birthday as I got home after midnight.

 

[SHUSA]

I purchased 4 yankee tickets on stub hub for day game vs rays the other day and was cursing digital tickets. I needed to link another app ball park to stub hub in order to email or text my tickets. Heads up if you purchase tickets and need to send them to friends driving in separately. Covid created a mess in the digital ticket world. No mention on stub hub when you purchase tickets about linking the ballpark app.

its mlb specific everything through the ballpark app. its pretty easy but annoying initially

 

[donnie_baseball]

I started keeping all my tickets from an early age - say 10. When the baseball strike in 1981 ended, I was at the Yankees' "second opening day game" against Texas - I want to say it was August 10. Just dumb luck - my mother had purchased the tickets through a Wayne Parks Department bus trip (she wouldn't drive to the Stadium) months before and that just happened to be where they resumed the schedule.

I had never been to an opening day (and only a handful of ballgames at all to that point) so this seemed like a ticket worth keeping. And so I just kept on doing it. Games, concerts, museums, movies - pretty much anything they make a ticket for, I kept it. It stopped being fun when print-at-home tickets started being a thing, but I still kept up with it for a while for archival purposes, but stopped doing that after a while. Just not as fun.

The most bittersweet pair of tickets I've got are unused and pristine, from one day in July when it was hot and humid as hell and I had blown my back out a couple weeks prior and just didn't think it was worth it to sit there and be miserably uncomfortable all afternoon just to see the Yankees play the Expos. It wound up being David Cone's perfect game. Whoops!

I'm with you on this one. Funny enough, the only opening day I ever went to was at Yankee Stadium in the mid-late 90's. It was called after 6 innings because of snow -- a completed game. As a thanks, they gave everyone who left that day their choice of a ticket for another game. The group I was with chose a game versus Seattle, they were the big rival then (WHY THE HELL DID YOU TRADE JAY BUHNER?!). That ticket stub ended up being Doc Gooden's no-hitter.

 

[TheHall87]

For subscribers to The Athletic, there's a piece up on the site today about this very subject.

It looks at it more from the speculator's side as ticket stubs and printed tickets are becoming more valuable.

 

[SHUSA]

For subscribers to The Athletic, there's a piece up on the site today about this very subject.

It looks at it more from the speculator's side as ticket stubs and printed tickets are becoming more valuable.

for collectors? my ticket stubs have the most value to me as memories, so im not even worried about it

 

[TheHall87]

For subscribers to The Athletic, there's a piece up on the site today about this very subject.

It looks at it more from the speculator's side as ticket stubs and printed tickets are becoming more valuable.

for collectors? my ticket stubs have the most value to me as memories, so im not even worried about it

Yes. Much like trading cards became valuable, so too are ticket stubs. Apparently people are asking for printed copies so they have something physical. Theoretically since there will be far few printed tickets, they will be more valuable especially for special events.

 

[SHUSA]

Yes. Much like trading cards became valuable, so too are ticket stubs. Apparently people are asking for printed copies so they have something physical. Theoretically since there will be far few printed tickets, they will be more valuable especially for special events.

i can just print my own mobile tickets. i just need the memory. was doing that well before mobile tix

but its a very interesting point.

 

[CT Pirate]

I'm with you on this one. Funny enough, the only opening day I ever went to was at Yankee Stadium in the mid-late 90's. It was called after 6 innings because of snow -- a completed game. As a thanks, they gave everyone who left that day their choice of a ticket for another game. The group I was with chose a game versus Seattle, they were the big rival then (WHY THE HELL DID YOU TRADE JAY BUHNER?!). That ticket stub ended up being Doc Gooden's no-hitter.

Sweet. Great story.

 

[CT Pirate]

For subscribers to The Athletic, there's a piece up on the site today about this very subject.

It looks at it more from the speculator's side as ticket stubs and printed tickets are becoming more valuable.

Thanks. Will check it out.

 

[SHUSource]

I'm with you on this one. Funny enough, the only opening day I ever went to was at Yankee Stadium in the mid-late 90's. It was called after 6 innings because of snow -- a completed game. As a thanks, they gave everyone who left that day their choice of a ticket for another game. The group I was with chose a game versus Seattle, they were the big rival then (WHY THE HELL DID YOU TRADE JAY BUHNER?!). That ticket stub ended up being Doc Gooden's no-hitter.

That's great - what a stroke of luck!

I eventually did go to a short string of actual opening days, say 1990 to '92 or '93, which weren't exactly the heyday of the franchise...

 

[SHUSource]

for collectors? my ticket stubs have the most value to me as memories, so im not even worried about it

Yes, same here, except for that David Cone perfect game. Not having actually gone, my only memory is of not using the the pair of tix, so I'd unload those in a heartbeat!

 

[SHUSA]

Yes, same here, except for that David Cone perfect game. Not having actually gone, my only memory is of not using the the pair of tix, so I'd unload those in a heartbeat!

ouch!