The Business of Sports Jerseys
Mr. Throwback wants to give you your memories back
A quarter block from Tompkins Square Park on 9th Street in the East Village sits a vintage shop called Mr. Throwback. Upon first glance the shop looks like a small arcade or a store full of odd sports memorabilia. The front window has two large, orange and purple stickers that outline the words “Mr. Throwback” in a jagged font. A life-sized paper cut out of Michael Jordan, wearing his white #23 Bulls jersey, dominates the window display. Around his neck is a fanny pack and two gold chains; on his head is a retro green-and-yellow pinstriped Oakland A’s baseball hat.
The store is no wider than two arm lengths. One wall is lined with hanging basketball jerseys, the other with hanging Starter jackets. Above both racks are hats. Tucked away in corners are football helmets, athlete figurines still wrapped in their original cardboard packaging, and VHS tapes of sports movies like 1993’s Rookie of the Year. On the wall behind the check-out counter is a clock made out of Michael Jordan basketball shoes — the first twelve signature shoes that Jordan released correlate to each hour of the day.
Standing under the clock is Mr. Throwback himself, known to his friends and family as Mike Spitz. He’s 37, but when I ask him how he got his start collecting the jerseys he sells his small eyes open wide, his forehead shrinks, and his mouth hangs open a little as if not able to wait until I finish asking the question.
“People walk in here and say, ‘It’s like my childhood bedroom!’” Spitz says. “And that is what I want to create for people. Because everything was great when you were a kid, you had no stress, nothing. We’re tapping back into that.”
Spitz studied sports management at Towson University in Maryland. When he graduated in 2005 he aspired to work in sports business, but, like many young graduates, he didn’t actually know what that would mean. He moved back in with his parents, in Bellmore, Long Island. Not long after, he found a Champion-brand basketball jersey from when he was 13 in the corner of his bedroom closet.
“I tried it on and it fit me! And I was like, Wow! This is dope. Maybe I can find more?” He started researching online and going to thrift stores and small estate sales. And soon, he discovered the treasures of eBay. “That was my first opening to, Wow, there is a lot of this out there, people are getting rid of it, maybe I can buy it cheap, and sell it for x number of dollars.”
Spitz got a job working at his brother-in-law’s accounting firm in Manhattan. But he kept collecting basketball jerseys. By 2010, he estimates that he had between 600 to 700. “Mostly all Champion jerseys because that is what I grew up on as a kid, so I related to them really well,” Spitz said.
He decided to launch a website and sell his jerseys there. Someone had already claimed “Mr. Throwback,” so he trademarked “Mister Throwback.” Before the year was out, Spitz had sold every one of his jerseys. Each sold between $20 to $100 dollars.
But it wasn’t until a Saturday in 2011, when Spitz first visited a large flea market out in Brooklyn, that his dream of owning a storefront began to develop. As he wandered the market, he came across two men selling old sportswear, including some jerseys. He went up to them and said, “I have a bunch of jerseys; can I sell with you?” They agreed to let him tag along the next day.
“I was mind blown,” Spitz said putting his palms down flat against the counter at Mr. Throwbacks. “I’m showing people what I have, people are looking at it, and then we are talking about it: we are reminiscing about throwback jerseys, talking about where I found these jerseys. And then, the one person who did buy, it was like a $75 jersey, and he said I have $50, and I said how about $60 and he was like alright, and it was done.”
“It was so… thrilling,” Spitz said, his voice full and loud. “I was amazed by it. I was like, I need to do this for the rest of my life.”
He started selling jerseys five days a week at the Dekalb Flea Market in Brooklyn. When he and the other sellers got displaced by the luxury City Point Brooklyn mall, he didn’t let himself get too down for long. He started thrifting around the city and keeping his eyes out for a storefront of his own. Eventually, and after some heavy rent negotiating, he found one he could just barely afford in the East Village. With no business plan, but a lot of enthusiasm, he opened. A few years later, when he needed more space, he moved into his current location, across the street.
Jerseys and other pieces of an athlete’s uniform are relative newcomers to the world of sports memorabilia, which for years was dominated by historic balls, cleats, pucks, helmets, bats, and cards. But sometime in the 1980s, a market began to develop for old jerseys, in particular ones actually worn by players during their careers. These became known as “game-worn” jerseys.
An avid collector named Richard Russek created Grey Flannel Auctions in Westhampton, Long Island, in 1989. When he began the company, there was no auction component. Russek met directly with athletes and their families, team doctors, and equipment managers, and facilitated private sales to collectors. According to Russek’s son Michael, who now runs the family business, Grey Flannel was one of the first memorabilia shops to specialize in finding and selling one-off player-worn jerseys. At the time, he told me, these jerseys were not thought of as valuable. “They were keepsakes for the family, people would have them in the closet just to remember the good days,” he said. “It could just be hanging around the family and no one really understands what it is.”
One of Grey Flannel’s first nationally recognized deals was when they purchased a 1932 Babe Ruth New York Yankees flannel uniform for a little over $10,000. “Everyone thought it was ridiculous that you are buying used clothing for $10,000,” Michael Russek, who moved the business to Scottsdale, Arizona, told me. “Fast track 25 years later, that item is now worth in excess of $5 million.” Grey Flannel has helped the NBA run their Annual Enshrinement Auction and authenticated jerseys for Sotheby’s Barry Halper collection of baseball uniforms.
When Grey Flannel created their first auction in the early 2000s, the online platform changed the landscape of the whole industry.
“We’ve seen prices steadily increase since its infancy,” Russek said. “The beauty of the internet and the fact that all of our websites are so easily reached is that fresh material is now coming to us.”
But beyond an increased supply, the auction site also established a relatively transparent market for buyers and sellers.
“When you have a one-of-one item coming up with a direct private sale price, it is very difficult, you have very few benchmarks,” Russek said. “The auction platform really lets the material sell for what it is supposed to.”
The company also introduced what is by their account a highly rigorous authentication process for the items it sells. Grey Flannel checks jerseys for thread count, missed stitches, the age and make of the actual thread; they match the stitch length against other known verified jerseys, the weight of the fabric, the way the “identifiers” (like patches and logos) are sewn on, the construction of the actual jersey (does it have Raglan sleeves, and should it?). They make sure there are no breaks in the thread where maybe it could have been manipulated to change a player’s name. Russek said that Grey Flannel has a team of five experts who conduct this authentication process. They also have outside experts: one for game-used hockey gear, another for autographs, a third for game-used bats.
Grey Flannel also uses its database of previously authenticated jerseys to check others. For example, if they have a jersey which the seller claims is from the 1942 St. Louis Cardinals, and they already have a jersey from that team that they know came directly from a family member, they’ll match the teammate’s jersey to the one in their database.
“The value of these things is so related to bidder confidence,” Russek said. “And the more authentic material that you source and your name gets out there and your reputation, there is a comfort level knowing that the experts have seen this and deem it authentic.”
Not every jersey is perfect. There are jerseys that have gone under a team-instituted number change or jerseys that have been recycled through the organization. For example, Russek noted that New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle’s jersey underwent a number change around 1950. But there are also jerseys that are designed to deceive.
“Filtering out the jerseys that were made with malicious intent is a major part of our job,” Russek said. While some are easy to spot, others are more complicated. “For example, taking a 1930 New York Yankee jersey of a player that is not well known, stripping the number down, adding a number 3 to the back, and trying to pass it off as Babe Ruth’s: That would add tremendous value on a jersey that is authentic but not necessarily originally tied to Babe Ruth.”
While other authentication companies — including MEARS, Sports Investors Authentication, Beckett Authentication Services, PSA — have similar processes, there’s no official industry standard or regulator for figuring out if a jersey is real. “We try to look at every item that comes in with fresh eyes, no matter where it comes from, no matter what paper work it comes with,” Ruessek said.
Recently, Grey Flannel has started working with a company called Photo-Match.com, which has a massive online database of vintage images from actual games. This database helps facilitate a new technique called “photo-matching,” where experts like Russek digitally zoom into images of players during a game to check the unique characteristics of a jersey.
“You are able to see, visually, that all these angles, and lighting, and garment, are lining up to say with a comfort level this is actually the jersey on this guy’s back,” Russek said.
Grey Flannel has held a total of 53 auctions of jerseys and other memorabilia items. Between those auctions and other private sales, they’ve handled over $75 million dollars. The percent that Grey Flannel takes from the sales operates on a sliding scale depending on the material. But the buyers always pay 20% to Grey Flannel as a buyer’s premium, which is common to pay when auctioning any item at an auction house, be it art or sports jerseys.
According to Paul Lukas, a writer for the website Uni-Watch, the rise of merchandising sports jerseys is a relatively recent phenomenon.
“I’m 55-years-old and when I was growing up in the 70s I was a big Mets fan, which I still am,” Lukas said. “But I couldn’t buy a Mets hat or jersey even if I wanted to because that market didn’t exist yet. They hadn’t figured out that people would pay for these things.”
Though Mr. Throwback’s demographic ranges from moms buying for their eight-year-old sons to twentysomethings wanting to capture today’s 90s fashion trend, and Grey Flannel’s demographic tends to be older and wealthier, both Spitz and Russek echoed the idea that today there is not only more interest but more access, and so, more possibility to buy what you always wanted when you were a kid.
On a crisp Saturday evening in early November, Mr. Throwback’s shop was warm and glowing in soft, yellow light. Spitz was taking the weekend off, but the store was ably manned by two employees, Jack Meiselman and Gio Torres.
When I came in, Jack was telling a customer about how the weekend before, the actor Nicholas Turturro came into the store to try on a Dick Butkus jersey from when he played at Illinois, but got cold feet when he learned the price. “That’s at $250 right now, so either you’re going to pay $250 or you’re not going to find this, I said,” Jack related to the customer. “He loves the shop, loves this stuff. He really wanted the jersey. He won’t find it, in reality, because it is super rare.”
The customer listening to this story was from Philadelphia; he and three friends were in the store looking for Eagles jerseys. Jack showed him an Eagles jacket on the rack; the customer held it up for his girlfriend. “What do you think?” he said. She laughed and shook her head no.
Later, once the Eagles fans left empty-handed but entertained by perusing the shop, Jack and Gio discussed their sports fandom.
“I watch everything,” Jack said drawing out the “thing” in an absolute tone. “Everything from tennis to,” he paused and his eyes looked up, “soccer.” He was wearing a New York Giants hat and a white t-shirt with caricatures on it of U.S.A. Olympic Basketball team members.
Jack and Gio have worked at Mr. Throwbacks for three to four years. Jack grew up in Chicago playing a lot of basketball, a little ice hockey, a little football, and very little baseball. Gio, who grew up in New York City, played a lot of baseball and basketball, eventually football, soccer, then cross country and track. He now does boxing and mixed martial arts.
Today Jack said he’s “transitioned into primarily a fan.” Both Jack and Gio are superstitious in the way they watch sports. Gio was wearing a black t-shirt with the Friends lettering across the top of his chest. Below it, a cut-out of Jennifer Aniston’s head and torso. She’s wearing a grey Knicks basketball sweatshirt. Behind her floating head are other square-cut images of Ross, Joey, and Chandler at a Knicks game. Their mouths are open and they’re holding foam fingers. At the very bottom corner of the t-shirt is a Mr. Throwback logo.
Gio turned back to the computer, and Jack started moving from the back room to the desk, bringing out black Starter jackets. He laid them out on the counter and looked over each of them. I’m not really sure what he was looking for in this specific moment, but I imagined the list of authenticating factors that I’ve now learned about are running through his head.
A customer from Boston named Colin walked in wearing a Nike corduroy pastel rainbow hat. Jack immediately said, “I like the hat man, I gotta get one.”
“Thank you,” said Colin. He checked out Jack’s outfit. “I like the shoes,” he said. “I got the same pair.” Jack was wearing Sean Wotherspoon-made Nike tennis shoes; they have the same rainbow pastel palette as Colin’s hat.
“You rock them with the hat?” Jack asked.
“I have a few times,” Colin said. “I don’t try to do it too much. I don’t want to look like a tool.”
“That’s ballsy,” Jack said.
“If you want to take a peek at it, go for it.” The fan took off his hat and handed it to Jack.
“That is a super sick hat,” Jack said. “I’ve never seen that in person, actually. That is sick.”
After a lengthy conversation trading stories about how different pairs of sneakers they own got dirty and the different ways they have cleaned them, Colin said, “I hate to break up the conversation but have you guys gotten any more Celtics gear?”
“We have a t-shirt here somewhere, with the Celtics logo,” Gio said. I could hear the click of the hangers against the metal bar, as he looked through the hanging shirts. He did find one Celtics jersey, but Colin already tried it on last time and it was too small for him. Colin left, promising to return, and the employees went back to philosophizing about jerseys.
“A true fan will have old gear,” Jack said. “Not only because it could be your grandpa or whatever, in that sense, but because of the fact that, even if you’re not, it looks like you’ve been a fan for a long time.”
“There’s like a sense of loyalty,” Gio said. “It shows how loyal you are to that team.”
“‘Yo, that jacket is from the 80s, how do you know about that?’” Gio said, imagining an encounter with a fellow super-fan. “And you can say, ‘Yeah I do, I’m a true fan, I’ve done my research. I know my history.’”
In a growing industry, there are bound to be mistakes. But when the industry’s success depends on matching 50-year-old jerseys to 50-year-old photos, controversy is always in the conversation.
In 2002, Wayne Pathman spotted a 1947 Joe DiMaggio New York Yankees jerseys on Grey Flannel Auctions site that he wanted. He quickly called Russek to ask for more details about the qualities of the jersey. Pathman claims, according to court documents, that Russek promised Pathman he had conducted an investigation into the authentication of the jersey by comparing it to photographs DiMaggio was wearing during the 1947 season and that there was a picture of DiMaggio signing the jersey as evidence for the authentic signature.
Feeling assured, Pathman bid approximately $35,000 and shortly after was informed that he was the highest bidder. He received the jersey and from 2002 to 2009 he purchased many other pieces from Grey Flannel Auctions, amounting to spending almost $500,000 in total.
But in 2009 Pathman had a change of heart about the DiMaggio jersey and wanted to sell it back to Grey Flannel Auctions. However, when Grey Flannel Auctions called Pathman back they told him the jersey had gone out of favor and was only worth what Pathman originally paid for it. Though Grey Flannel was offering him his money back, he was angry that the jersey hadn’t appreciated.
Pathman went to another one of the reputable authentication companies called Memorabilia Evaluation and Research Services, otherwise known as MEARS. MEARS attempted to authenticate the jersey and could not.
In April 2010, Pathman filed a two-count complaint against Grey Flannel Auction in United State District Court of South Florida alleging “fraud in the Inducement” and “Negligent Misrepresentation.”
Despite Russek traveling to Florida on business two or three times a year, the court ultimately dismissed Pathman’s complaints on the basis of Grey Flannel Auctions not having enough minimum contacts to be responsible for personal jurisdiction in the state of Florida. I attempted to contact Pathman but I never heard back.
Five years later in Pennsylvania, a man named Michael Jacob’s filed a similar suit against Grey Flannel Auctions.
In December of 1999, Jacob had purchased a 1951 Willie Mays New York Giants signed jersey from a Sotheby’s auction. The Sotheby’s catalogue, titled “The Barry Halper Collection of Baseball Memorabilia,” was created with the help of Grey Flannel. On page 37 the catalogue read, “Grey Flannel has authenticated all uniforms and apparel (excluding most baseball hats),” according to court documents.
However, when Jacob went to sell the jersey for $657,000 and his potential buyer got the jersey authenticated by MEARS, MEARS again found the jersey inauthentic.
Grey Flannel argued again that there was a lack of jurisdiction, and that they had no official connection to Sotheby’s.
The court dismissed the claims against Grey Flannel Auction, and only found Sotheby’s accountable for one claim of fraud. Jacob could not be reached for comment.
In 2014, the Daily News reported, a Chicago grand jury investigation sent subpoenas to Grey Flannel Auction, which stemmed from a Chicago FBI seven-year investigation into fraud in the sports memorabilia industry.
When I asked how Grey Flannel Auctions authenticated the DiMaggio jersey and the Mays jersey, as well as about the grand jury investigation, Russek said he would not comment on any of it.
Spitz’s current store has come far since his early days of selling his childhood favorite Champion jerseys. He said he’s being less stubborn and opening his world to selling Adidas, Reebok, and Nike jerseys. And while his primary items are jerseys and Starter jackets, he now sells vintage team t-shirts and sweatshirts, memorabilia, and his own line of Mr. Throwback t-shirts.
Embedded within Spitz’s search for the 1990s and 1980s jerseys he sells — which can originate anywhere from an ex-team manger selling extra jerseys, old manufacturers releasing never used jerseys, or family members selling their children’s jerseys and come to be found by Spitz in thrift stores or on eBay — is the hope and possibility that he finds a jersey that is being sold without its owner’s knowledge of its true value.
“Personally I collect stuff now. That is a problem in this industry, you want to keep shit,” Spitz said. “I collect basketball jerseys, but I want ones worn by the player, like actually worn.” He pauses and looks at me for a while to make sure I get it.
“The fact that a player wore it, to me, is the holy grail,” Spitz said.
When I ask Spitz how he knows he has found these “holy grails” (which he calls “grails” for short) he explained a process that mirrors Grey Flannel’s, “you look for the tagging, the years, the types of logo patches. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into it.”
Last year, he found a Karl Malone 1994 All-Star jersey on eBay posted for $500. Before making any bid, he asked the seller where they got the jersey. The seller said they got it at the 1994 All-Star game. “He didn’t say Karl Malone gave it to him at the All-Star game,” Spitz pointed out. But Spitz still felt it was worth bidding. The jersey is white with navy blue and red lining with an NBA logo with a star, the number 32, and the words, “All-Stars.” The back has “MALONE” in navy blue in a semi-circle above his number 32.
But there’s one more crucial step in Spitz’s process that isn’t in Grey Flannel’s, and that is Spitz’s Instagram followers.
Spitz didn’t get his hands on the Malone jersey until the end of the bidding when he was the final bidder paying $1,200. Once he had it he posted it on his Instagram account, he immediately got messages from people telling him he needed to get the jersey officially authenticated.
“A lot of people don’t know that extra step of going to grade it, to photo match it, and then to put it in these online auctions,” Spitz said.
Spitz sent his Karl Malone jersey to Grey Flannel and after a few weeks his jersey came back with a grade of 10 out of 10, and an offer to sell it in Grey Flannel Auction’s December catalogue. Russek predicted it would sell for between $7,000 and $10,000.
Elan Rodman, who runs the Instagram account @lostandfoundmuseum and studied vintage sportswear at Parson’s School of Design, found a 1973 game-worn NHL All-Star jersey allegedly belonging to hockey player Phil Esposito at a thrift shop in New York City. He bought it for $55 dollars. Twenty minutes after he posted a picture of the jersey on Instagram as a retail uniform, his inbox was flooded with messages from people saying this jersey was real. He sent it to Grey Flannel Auction and after receiving their stamp of approval it sold it for $10,450.
Originally, Spitz didn’t want to put his Karl Malone jersey up for auction. While other Grey Flannel buyers like to display jerseys on their walls, think of them as investments or flashy talking points, Spitz transcends the world of auction collectors to his customers that he meets every day: Spitz wears his jerseys to the games to feel a part of the history, to display the fact that he is a passionate fan, and to do a little business.
“For me, I want to be wearing the best that a team has to offer,” Spitz said. “For me as a store owner, I want to be cooler than the next guy.”
When Spitz heads out to a game he makes sure to bring along business cards. “I go to games and look for people wearing old shit. I’m like yo can I buy that from you?”
“I like a 70-year-old guy wearing an old Yankee jacket with 80 pins on it because he was at every single game back in the day,” Spitz said telling me about a game he attended. “That is a story. I bought it off this guys back. He was at every game he could tell me about all of them.”
But with the Malone jersey Spitz’s friends and wife kept reminding him that he was in the business of selling jerseys and this was the perfect opportunity to make a lot of money.
When I asked Spitz about Grey Flannel’s lawsuits and the grand jury investigation Spitz said he hadn’t heard of it, but he guesses that that could happen because there is always human error.
“I just trust that these companies that are auctioning off these items — that it is real,” Spitz said. “But I’m sure things like that happen, I mean, it is like anything, people fake sneakers, people fake Prada bags. I’m trying to adopt a baby and there are frickin’ scam artists for that. There’s a scam for everything.”
On January 15, Spitz’s Malone jersey will be sold to the highest bidder; Spitz will put the profits back into his store, which will fuel his cycle of searching, discovering, authenticating, and selling jerseys to other sports fans. The cycle will be fueled again when he comes across another jersey that no one realizes is a holy grail.
