Signed ticket stub from Lou Gehrig’s retirement game sells for $95,600 at Cleveland auction

NEW YORK, N.Y. – A ticket stub signed by Lou Gehrig on the day he retired from baseball sold for $95,600 at an auction on Thursday, and the boxing gloves Muhammad Ali wore in the first of his three fights against Joe Frazier sold for $388,375.

The July 4, 1939, ticket and the 1971 Fight of the Century gloves were among the highlights from Heritage Auctions’ sale at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Cleveland.

Gehrig’s 1924 rookie year contract sold for $358,500. A 1927 New York Yankees signed baseball sold for $143,400, and Babe Ruth’s 702nd home run ball sold for $191,200.

The auction house said more than 60,000 tickets were sold to Gehrig’s last game, at Yankee Stadium in New York. Only two tickets are known to have survived. Of them, only the mezzanine box ticket had Gehrig’s autograph.

The ticket was owned, until Thursday’s auction, by a collector who did not want to be identified.

Gehrig retired after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, now known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In his farewell speech that day he said he considered himself “the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”