Henry von Kohorn ’66 Has a Ticket From Nearly Every World Series Game. Ever.
Tens of thousands of people will fill Milwaukee’s American Family Field and Tampa’s Tropicana Field this week for the 122nd World Series. Every one of them will swipe their phone to gain admittance and find their seats. Paper tickets have gone the way of paper love letters or World Series games played in the afternoon.
Henry von Kohorn ’66 thinks that’s a shame.
Von Kohorn collects World Series tickets, and his collection is practically Ruthian. He has stubs from every Series starting with the very first, in 1903, between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Boston Americans (soon to become the Red Sox), through 2019 (Washington Nationals vs. Houston Astros). In fact, he has tickets to all but 17 World Series games played during that period. Why nothing after 2019? Because Major League Baseball stopped printing them.
Growing up a Yankees fan in Scarsdale, New York, von Kohorn says he always loved the game. “My dad took me to the Polo Grounds [home of the New York Giants] when I was about 7,” he reflects. “I don’t remember the game, but I remember that he liked the Giants and I liked the Yankees. I think you tend to latch on to the team that’s good when you were growing up.”
A childhood favorite was Yankee shortstop Phil “Scooter” Rizzuto. Von Kohorn’s dog, a King Charles spaniel, is named The Scooter. A previous dog was named The Babe. He’d like to name his next one Paul O’Neill, after the Yankee right fielder from their championship run in the late ’90s, but his wife Meredith has vetoed that.
It was von Kohorn’s good fortune to grow up witnessing the Yankee dynasty of the 1950s. In 1956, his father took him to his first World Series, Games 3 and 4, at Yankee Stadium. Von Kohorn could have gone to Game 5, as well, but he had school that day and so missed seeing the Yankees’ Don Larsen pitch the only perfect game in Series history.
Von Kohorn doesn’t collect wine or first editions or art, but he loves tickets. It goes beyond baseball. He has a stub from the Princeton basketball team’s 1965 NCAA Final Four game and its upset of UCLA in the 1996 tournament. He has tickets from every Princeton lacrosse championship game, including this year’s (he printed a screenshot of the ticket on his phone just to keep the collection complete). He has tickets from each of the nine Olympics he has been to, starting with the 1960 games in Rome.
The centerpieces of von Kohorn’s collection are gems from the national pastime. He didn’t start collecting World Series tickets until around 1998, when he lived in Westport, Connecticut. There was a coin and stamp store nearby that had two framed World Series tickets in the window, one of them to Larsen’s perfecto, the game von Kohorn missed attending.
“I thought, ‘That’s pretty cool,’ so I bought them,” he recalls.
On eBay he found a lot more tickets — that’s where he built most of his collection. “I would just buy everything I didn’t have,” he explains. “Some people collect and collect and collect. My target was big and ambitious, but it was finite.”
More recently, as he’s trying to locate the harder-to-find tickets, von Kohorn scours higher-end auction sites. Some of his tickets, for example, come from the estate of the late memorabilia collector Barry Halper; he picked them up at Sotheby’s in 1999. “Things were a lot cheaper then,” von Kohorn says. “They are multiples of that now.” (Should you ever suspect you’re bidding against him, know that von Kohorn operates under the monicker “Fall Classicist.”)
According to writer Keith Neely on the blog FreshTix, tickets to athletic competitions date back thousands of years. Patrons in ancient Rome used small disks of engraved clay or bronze to gain admission to the Coliseum for gladiatorial contests. “Even then,” Neely writes, “these tokens represented something more than mere entry — they symbolized belonging.” Familiar paper tickets date back to advances in printing technology in the 19th century.
Many World Series tickets, particularly the older ones, are all business, containing little more than the game number, seat location, and rain check policy. Others, though, feature colorful team logos. Some are little works of art. All have a magical quality evoking the past.
Von Kohorn keeps them in protective plastic sheets in a binder. As he flips through the pages in his den in Princeton, memories of some of the great moments in World Series history leap off the page. He has tickets to all the games thrown by the infamous 1919 Black Sox; Babe Ruth’s called shot in 1932; Willie Mays’ over-the-shoulder catch in 1954; Bill Buckner’s cataclysmic error in 1986; and game-winning homers by Bill Mazeroski in 1960, Carlton Fisk in 1975, and Kirk Gibson in 1988.
In addition, von Kohorn has tickets from every MLB All-Star game, though he notes that they are easier to find than World Series tickets, in part because there are fewer of them. He doesn’t like to say how much he pays (it’s a lot), but notes that the most expensive baseball ticket ever sold at auction, which he doesn’t have, was to Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. That sold for $480,000 in 2022, a relative bargain. Someone reportedly paid $1.17 million to attend Game 7 of the 2016 Series when the Chicago Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians.
“Most of what I buy is not a bargain,” von Kohorn admits. “I’m willing to pay up for what I don’t have.”
Paper tickets began to peter out before they disappeared. As von Kohorn’s collection illustrates, tickets were printed for only a few of the games in the 2018 and 2019 World Series. COVID proved to be the death knell. Fans couldn’t attend the 2020 Series, of course, and teams stopped printing tickets thereafter.
Tickets on our phone screens are neither as pretty nor as permanent as the old paper stubs that once burned in our pockets and now sit in scrapbooks. But they are easier to sell online, harder to forge, and more convenient.
Even von Kohorn concedes that point. “I prefer having them in my phone. It’s just easier,” he says. “But it’s another end of an era thing. There was something special about having the ticket to an event you saw.”
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