Joe Baird felt anxious and a bit uneasy.
He had just flown nearly 3,000 miles cross-country, from his home in Seattle to Miami, where he was about to enter the house of a fellow collector he’d never met in person.
“This feels so strange,” Baird thought to himself. “What if this guy's gonna abduct me or something?”
Baird was willing to take the risk because he knew his fellow hobbyist shared the same passion that drove him: an all-consuming quest to collect a ticket from every game in which Ken Griffey Jr. homered during his 22-year major-league career.
For those scoring at home, that’s a total of 573 tickets representing 630 homers, and Baird was closing in on the completion of a collectible journey that would take him nearly three years.
With the finish line in sight, Baird jumped at an offer from fellow Griffey collector Rick Siefert in April 2023, to fly down to Florida and potentially buy a number of the tickets Baird desperately needed.
"The first night I get there, he comes and picks me up from the airport, and his wife makes dinner,” Baird recalled. “(Then) he says, you want to see the collection?”
Of course, Baird wanted nothing more than to go upstairs to Siefert’s Griffey room to see not only the tickets, but the rest of one of the hobby’s most extensive collections devoted to The Kid, including autographed jerseys, uncut sheets of 1989 Upper Deck rookie cards, cardboard stand-up cut-outs and a slew of binders filled with cards and tickets.
“We walk up the stairs, and there he's got his piece just sitting right there on the ledge at the top of the stairs, just a pistol sitting there,” Baird said.
“Just to let me know … no funny business. If you want to get up to anything, I’m willing to shoot you.”
"I broke down in tears right there in the visitor's clubhouse."
— cllct (@cllctMedia) May 7, 2025
- Joe Baird when he realized he finally completed his Ken Griffey Jr. ticket quest ???? pic.twitter.com/nOJxH84nQx
No firearms were necessary as Baird eventually sealed a deal to buy about 70 of the tickets he was missing, moving him within 20 of his ultimate goal.
Ironically, before the exchange, Siefert was actually closer to landing all 573 tickets than Baird — but once he met Baird and sensed his obsession with finishing the collection, Siefert made the gracious decision to step aside and help a fellow collector attain his goal instead.
“I was able to take that torch and get it across the finish line,” Baird said. “I was able to finish this 30-year long journey that Rick had been on.”
While the goodwill of another collector provided Baird the critical boost he needed, the ill will of one hobbyist helped light Baird’s initial fire.
Shortly after acquiring the ticket for Griffey’s 500th home run, Baird, a 47-year-old special-education teacher in Seattle, made the decision in February 2021 to try to collect every Griffey homer. A wild thought during the COVID-19 pandemic quickly turned into something Baird “started getting manic about it.”
Baird poured himself into the pursuit and sent out lists to fellow ticket collectors, searching for some of the games he was missing. One response really stuck with him.
“Part of what drove this is that early on, I met another Griffey collector who was also trying to complete the set, and he just wasn't very nice to me,” Baird said. “I just didn't like the way that he treated me. And it just kind of felt like, man, what's your problem, buddy? …
“So, when that happened. I decided I'm gonna beat this guy. I want to beat this guy.
“You hear Michael Jordan talk about how he would look for ways to drive his competitiveness and tend to get motivated. And I think throughout this that really pushed me.”
So, Baird became even more determined to land all 573 tickets,
The September 1990 game in which Ken Griffey Sr. and Jr. homered in consecutive at-bats. The eight consecutive games from 1993 in which Junior went deep to tie an MLB record. The milestone homers of 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 and 600.
Baird needed them all.
And he also needed those random weekday nights in Cleveland in the early 1990s, when the crowds were sparse, the weather could be rainy and few tickets would be preserved.
Or the ticket from Kansas City on June 17, 1994, the night of the O.J. Simpson car chase, which became a tough find because that game was featured in ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary about the day,
After 35 months of eBay notifications, joining random Facebook groups and that fortuitous flight to Florida, Baird was just one ticket away.
July 31, 1996: Mariners at Brewers, the game in which Griffey Jr. hit homers 222 and 223.
So, he joined every Brewers fan group he could find, spreading the word he needed just a single ticket to complete his quest.
Baird will never forget the moment when his phone buzzed March 24, 2024.
“I was at Mariners Fan Fest down at the stadium, and I was standing in the visitors dugout and got the notification on my phone of the email. I opened the email, and it was an email from somebody with the picture of the ticket, saying, ‘I have the ticket.’
“And I broke down in tears right there in the visitors clubhouse. I mean, it was so poetic that I was there at the stadium.”
Although Baird described it as a random “$5 ticket,” he paid the owner a $1,000 bounty for the stub that completed his 573-ticket journey.
“This was in the back of somebody's closet, and there was no way that they were going to go looking for this ticket,” he said. “But when you attach a dollar-figure like that to it, people went looking for it.”
When the ticket finally arrived in the mail a few days later, Baird couldn’t bring himself to open the envelope for a couple days. Eventually, he held a small ceremony with his wife, Pam, and young children, Joe IV and Tilly, for the first viewing of the elusive ticket.
The collection could be an heirloom that Baird passes on to his children. He also would love to put it on display for fans to enjoy at either T-Mobile Park or the Baseball Hall of Fame.
As for selling it? Well, Baird quotes a former pro wrestler in his answer to that question.
“Ted DiBiase says, everybody has a price, so I certainly wouldn't discount selling it. I'm not actively looking to sell it, but if somebody came knocking on my door and wanted to show some very serious interest in buying it, it's something I would consider selling,” Baird said.
"But I also love it, and I don't mind having it.”
The collection provides Baird with a connection to the game he loves so deeply and an athlete he has always felt a bond with.
"Junior was my sports idol,” said Baird, who lived in Spokane, Washington, when Griffey joined the Mariners. Baird only had a single ticket from a Mariners game he attended when he started the collection.
“He came up in ’89, and I was 11 years old, and we suddenly had the coolest guy on the planet wearing his hat backward, big smile on his face. He was a guy that everybody wanted to be.”
Kevin Jackson is the chief content officer for cllct, the premier company for collectible culture.