"Get 'Em Before They're Gone."

That's the motto emblazoned on the Minnesota Twins' 2002 pocket schedules, but it easily could be the slogan for anything resembling a piece of memorabilia of a baseball team that is a likely candidate for contraction. After a vote Tuesday, Major League Baseball owners overwhelming approved eliminating at least two teams, providing opportunity for collectors to capitalize on merchandise of soon-to-be-defunct organizations.

In the past, customers would walk into Dome Souvenirs Plus across from the Metrodome at this time of year and take a free schedule off the counter. "Now they're taking 10 or 20," said store owner Ray Crump, a former batboy with the Washington Senators who became the Minnesota Twins equipment manager after the team moved in 1961.

"It's like when a person dies, their memorabilia goes up in price," said Jim Bouton, the author of "Ball Four" and pitcher for the Seattle Pilots, a team that lasted one season before relocating to Milwaukee and renamed the Brewers in 1970. "No one thought that some of the items we had from that season would be worth more than we were."

While items relating to Bouton's defunct team are coveted, dealers say that an abundance of today's memorabilia items won't make for a bullish market for collectibles of the teams that might disappear.

"People have been collecting items of the Twins and Expos from Day One," said Keith Schneider, owner of Gasoline Alley Antiques, a collectibles store that sells Pilots items. "Since there are so many licensees, collectors have a choice of 500 items a year over the last 10 years. With a team like the Pilots, every single item you could possibly get is pretty well documented."

The Holy Grail of Seattle Pilots collectibles is a promotional radio made for the season that never happened. The radios were found inside the Pilots' stadium after the team moved. Known quantity of these radios today? Three, according to Charles Kapner, the Redmond, Wash., resident who said he has more than 500 Pilots items, including two of the radios.

"Today the supply of these items is constant," said Kapner, who said Pilots' game-used jerseys sell for at least $900. Kapner owns a jersey of Pilots manager Joe Schultz.

If you thought finding a Twins or Expos game-used jersey from last season was hard, try to find a Pilots jersey. The jerseys of yesteryear were not manufactured with mass distribution in mind like those of today's teams. "They either sent the jerseys down to minor league teams or they ripped off the Pilots and replaced it with Brewers when they moved," said Bouton, who never wore the Brewers jersey because he was traded to the Houston Astros before the end of the 1969 season. "If you looked carefully at the letters (on the Brewers jerseys) you could see the Pilots logo outline."

Said Schneider: "In 1969, baseball memorabilia collecting was probably limited to 10,000 people. Now as soon as a team dies, people will make hoards of this stuff and store items in their sheds for safekeeping."

Apparel sales of older-team designs depend on whether the item becomes fashionable, said Peter Capolino, owner of Mitchell and Ness, which sells authentically tailored flannel 1969 Seattle Pilots and 1960 Washington Senators jerseys for $275 apiece.

"The Pilots jerseys are really popular among the hip-hop and the rap crowd," said Capolino, who said he sells about 72 Pilots home jerseys a year. Though he stopped making the road jersey because of the scarcity of its material, he said he could sell hundreds today because of its popular Tar Heel blue tint.

A contracted team's current apparel will see a decline in demand "for at least five or six years," Capolino said. That happened with the old designs of the (1980) Houston Astros and the (1984) San Diego Padres, whose rainbow and mud-brown jerseys, respectively, were often considered the ugliest but now ar eamong his bestsellers.

But don't expect items from the soon-to-be-defunct teams to find their way into bargain bins. "There's been a lot of people coming in over the past couple days asking about when the sale is coming," Crump said.

And for Crump, that simply means he should raise prices.

Darren Rovell, who covers sports business for ESPN.com, can be reached at darren.rovell@espn.com