SAN DIEGO — Russ Havens is a real-life ticket master who has been collecting tickets for more than 40 years. 

“I realized those tickets were cool because they not only get you in the game, but they’re also like a little time-stamped keepsake of when you were there, who you were with,” Havens said.

What started as a hobby, turned into an online museum and business at TicketStubCollection.com.

“That’s how this whole website started, commercial artwork that was meant to be thrown away when you were done going to the game,” Havens said.

His website is a true testimony of one fan’s trash becoming another fan’s treasure. 

“Ticket stubs, you have so few of them to begin with — 20,000 people in an arena. How many people kept them, how many spilled beer on them,” Havens said. “The scarcity is what makes them different from baseball cards.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has made physical copies of tickets even harder to find. Havens believes they will eventually be gone altogether.

“They’ve been going away gradually for the last 15 years. COVID has really pushed that right to the edge,” he said.