Baseball’s Flee Market

If bunting from Yankee Stadium could sell for as much as $1,000 on eBay, as experts say, then other parts of the stadium could go for many thousands of dollars. The teams plan to promote the soon-to-be-destroyed facilities all season and offer a full range of souvenirs. "They need souvenirs at a price point so everyone can afford something," says Dan Rosenthal, who coordinated the sales of souvenirs from Busch Stadium in St. Louis and Tiger Stadium in Detroit. "You have to sell something for the guy who just has $5, even if it's just pebbles from the infield."

Yankee Stadium has more than just pebbles to sell. Though the 1970s renovation removed much of the old park, the team can still pitch it as the place where Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera made history. And it's not just baseball. Football's New York Giants played there from 1956 to 1973. Other major events—boxing bouts involving Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali; concerts; college football games, including the "Win one for the Gipper" game between Notre Dame and Army in 1928; New York Cosmos soccer games with Pele; and masses celebrated by Popes Paul VI and John Paul II—took place in the stadium. Shea has less history, but the Queens stadium has hosted a number of major events, including four World Series, classic games involving Tom Seaver and Dwight Gooden, and Joe Namath's Jets 1968 march to a Super Bowl title. And it was the site of a major Beatles concert on their 1965 tour.

Still, most revenues will come from the sale of seats, which fans use to put in dens and offices. Experts like Mike Heffner, of online memorabilia company Lelands.com, say pairs of stadium seats will "easily" fetch $1,000. If each team sells 25,000 pairs of attached seats for $500 apiece, they'll make $12 million. To get the most profits, the teams will probably space out sales to avoid glutting the market. So they might make $6 million right away and the rest in coming years.

The strangest souvenir might be urinals. When he was selling off Busch Stadium, Rosenthal put a urinal from behind the Cardinals dugout in the inventory "on a lark, as a joke," he says. Bidding started at $100 and increased to a final price of $2,174. A local urologist bought the porcelain for his office. When fans heard about it, they asked about the urinals from public bathrooms. They sold for hundreds of dollars. One fan scrubbed his trough-style urinal and uses it to store beer in his garage. "I told him not to invite me to any parties," Rosenthal says.

Obscure items can fetch a high price if some link can be made to history. One of the most famous moments at Tiger Stadium came in the 1971 All-Star Game, when Reggie Jackson hit a home run off a tower 380 feet from home plate and 100 feet above the field. Auctioneers took down the fencing that surrounded the tower, mounted it, and sold it for $500. Tiger fans also paid hundreds of dollars for powder-blue bricks, the first glimpse of the stadium for fans driving up Trumbull Street. What gives souvenirs value, says Rosenthal, is "anything you can trace back to a player touching or being near."

Stadium sell-offs prompt a torrent of emotions, as Rosenthal discovered when fans came to Tiger Stadium to pick up their souvenirs. "The first man who was there, he couldn't speak," Rosenthal says. "He just cried. And he wanted to see the field. I let him go back. And all day people went back and cried." Among the teary visitors was Willie Horton, who played for his hometown team from 1963 to 1977. He had not been back since the park closed in 1999. He got a pair of bleacher seats, from which his father watched him hit his first home run, off Robin Roberts.