The 1995 Seattle Mariners are a beloved team in the Pacific Northwest, fondly remembered for overcoming a 13-game deficit to win the AL West and claim the franchise’s first playoff berth behind future Hall of Famers Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez and Randy Johnson.
But long before the Mariners were regularly drawing more than 50,000 fans in their “Refuse to Lose” run in the late summer, crowds were extremely sparse in the Kingdome.
With Major League Baseball coming out of the 1994 lockout season, Seattle averaged less than 20,000 fans per night in April and May of the 1995 season. Even a three-game series against a promising young Yankees team in late May failed to pack the house.
The Memorial Day matchup against the Bronx Bombers drew just 18,948 fans for the M’s dramatic 8-7 walk-off win in 12 innings.
Why is any of this attendance data extremely important in the collectible world 30 years later?
Well, because in that May 29, 1995, matchup between the Yanks and Mariners, a highly-touted rookie shortstop named Derek Jeter made his major-league debut.
It was a fairly nondescript first MLB appearance that signaled very little of the greatness to come for The Captain as Jeter hit ninth, went 0-for-5 and struck out once.
So, you might forgive the few Mariners fans in attendance for discarding their tickets to that game, which was played long before most fans truly realized debut tickets could be hidden gold mines.
PSA has graded just 23 tickets to Jeter’s debut, per the Hall of Stubs account on Instagram, with five of those being added in the last year.
Geoff Reiss owned four tickets to that May 29 game as part of his season-ticket package with the Mariners — but, despite his most valiant efforts, he has been unable to locate any of them.
Reiss, who estimates he attended 20-25 games in the 1995 season, has a damn good excuse for not going.
May 29, 1995, was also the day his first child, son Walker, was born up the hill from the Kingdome at Swedish Hospital.
“My son was born around noon, and with my wife and son resting in the hospital that night, I went home and had a ‘free pass’ to do whatever I wanted that night,” Reiss said. “I thought about going to the game, but it was around 5 p.m., and I had been up all night. So I looked at the tickets and just thought, ‘Nah.’”
Reiss is an avid collector — he owns a game-used Tom Seaver jersey for his beloved Mets, a locker from the old Shea Stadium, a signed Richard Nixon baseball that was given to commissioner Bowie Kuhn, and tickets from games as far back as the 1929 World Series — so it pains him to not being able to locate those four unused, full tickets that could collectively be worth six-digits today.
A full Jeter debut ticket, graded PSA 9, sold for a record $31,200 in August 2022.
“The funny thing is, I have stuff everywhere,” Reiss said. “But among hundreds of artifacts, I have yet to find those … I just don’t have them.”
Although Reiss is reminded annually by a friend about those missing tickets, he still recalls that time three decades ago with extreme fondness.
Not only was his son born that week, Reiss, who worked as the VP of sports publishing at Starwave Corporation, was leading the team that in April 1995 had launched the website that eventually became ESPN.com (known originally as ESPNET SportsZone). Personally and professionally, it was one of the best periods of his life.
With his son coming home, Reiss didn’t go the next night, either, when Jeter collected his first major-league hit and went 2-for-3. PSA has graded just 21 tickets from that game.
In what Reiss calls a “genuine irony,” he did attend the game in which Jeter notched his 3,000th career hit on July 9, 2011, when The Captain launched a solo homer in a game against the Tampa Bay Rays at Yankee Stadium.
But all Reiss has to show for that moment is his memory of the milestone. He bought the tickets on StubHub, and they were delivered electronically.
Kevin Jackson is the chief content officer for cllct, the premier company for collectible culture.