Enjoy 2,400 Baseball Games for One Low Price

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Jason has been placed on the PUP (physically unable to publish) list this week, so I’ve been called up for a spot start. 

Real football doesn’t kick off for another week (and “week zero” of college football is mostly noise), which means this is still baseball season, folks. Watching America’s pastime has actually never been cheaper, even with those $15 beers at Nationals Park. Sharpen your pencils and crack open your scorebooks. 

As I mentioned, real football starts next week—and you can join the fun by signing up for the one and only official Reason survivor pool. Don’t miss out, go ahead and sign up. 

Locker Room Links

• Federal prosecutors have charged Daejon Labrayae Love with posing as a fake player for the San Francisco 49ers as part of a scheme that swindled more than twenty-five women out of over $1.3 million. Love allegedly “carried on romantic relationships with many of the victims and spoke of building wealth and a shared future,” before urging them to take on personal loans to invest in “nonexistent investment ventures.” Getting deeply invested in a plan that never pays off? Every 49ers fan under 35 can relate. 
• Novak Djokovic was upset in the opening round of the U.S. Open by Mariano Navone in a match that stretched beyond four hours and a half and included at least one girth-breaking moment for the 24-time major winner, who later admitted, “I didn’t enjoy myself.” Sounds about right.
• End of an era: Lionel Messi announces retirement from international play. Messi remains the first player to tally 20 World Cup goals (though Kylian Mbappé has since surpassed him). See the full tally here. 
• The end of a different era: ESPN is retiring its “BottomLine” ticker and score updates—likely because we all check scores on our phones anyway. 
• A squad of Curaçaoan youths, a country of roughly 150,000, captured the Little League World Series title for the second time.
• Folarin Balogun, the breakout star of the U.S. World Cup run this summer, will join the English Premier League this season. Everton acquired Balogun’s rights from Monaco for a reported 40 million pounds (about $54 million).
• Elsewhere in Reason, Nick Gillespie explains how the 2006 film Idiocracy foretold the future—and perhaps offers a bit of hope too?
• Having a rough week? Look on the bright side: you didn’t commit an error in six straight games like New York Yankees shortstop George Lombard Jr. (And yes, Lombard also injured his knee, which could sideline him for a few games—perhaps for the better).

This hasn’t happened to a Yankees player in over a century 😳

George Lombard Jr. has committed an error in 6 straight games, the longest streak by a Yankee since Chick Fewster in 1921. pic.twitter.com/S58qmwsZLE

— ESPN Insights (@ESPNInsights) August 28, 2026

More Baseball for Fewer Bucks

People love to gripe about how prices keep rising—and rightly so, because inflation can be brutal. Yet while it’s easy to notice hikes and the decline in quality, it’s less obvious how abundant modern life has become compared with times past. 

Sports fans may notice these shifts more than most. Many of us recall the days when there was no Red Zone channel and not every NCAA Tournament game was accessible on TV. Still, the scale of change is astonishing. 

A few years back, economist Gale Pooley compared costs then and now on his Substack: “A ticket to a Yankees game in 1923 cost $1.10. Unskilled workers in those days earned 22 cents an hour, so it took five hours of labor to cover the price. Workers in skilled trades earned 44 cents an hour, so it took about 2.5 hours.”

Of course, in 1923 there was no streaming option to watch the Yankees; the ballpark was the only route. Today, the typical American earns roughly $37 per hour, and MLB.TV’s full-season pass runs about $149.99. In other words, less than five hours of work buys you access to virtually every Major League Baseball game this season (excluding blackouts and in-market games).

As Pooley put it: “Enjoying baseball has become 242,000 percent more plentiful.”

Yes, there are diminishing returns to having every single game available on your screen. Yet this is a service that even the planet’s wealthiest person in the early 20th century could not have imagined, and you can obtain it for far less than a day’s earnings. Inflation is a problem, and policy moves should address it. Still, the best way to gauge how incredibly affluent modern America is is to notice the extraordinary conveniences we now take for granted. 

Playoffs Are for Winners

With only four weeks left in the MLB schedule, most teams in the American League still have a shot, save for a few powerhouses. Beyond Tampa Bay, Boston, and New York, the rest of the circuit is so tightly bunched that a club with a losing record might sneak into the postseason for the first time ever. This isn’t unfamiliar in the NBA or even in the NFL, but it feels especially odd in baseball, given the 162-game campaign and the tradition that playoff spots should be earned. Should the league tweak its rules to stop this from happening? ESPN’s Bradford Doolittle weighs in with several ideas, and the first is pretty sharp: just don’t let it happen.

“If only five teams reach .500 in a league, fine—you get five playoff spots. The team that would have been seeded by a losing club advances to the next round.”

Sure, that would disrupt TV deals by trimming the number of playoff series—but I’d go further: set the cutoff at, say, “12 games behind the leading team.” If the top squad wins 97 games, every other club would need 85 wins to qualify. Then assemble the bracket from the teams that clear the mark.

The upside: the best team could actually eliminate contenders by winning in late-season, meaningfully pointless games. If you can’t stay within 12 games over a 162-game slate, you probably don’t deserve a shot at the title.

This will never happen, but it should. (Feel free to send your own wild proposals.)

A related topic: the coming off-season will bring major drama as players and owners negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement. The conventional wisdom is that owners will push for some form of salary cap to curb the spending of large markets like the Dodgers and the Mets. But doesn’t the current level of parity in the American League already suggest a level playing field under the existing system?

Swing and a Miss

It appears the Tampa Bay Rays are edging closer to the long-awaited new stadium, after the Hillsborough County Commission granted final approval to a subsidy plan that will hand them roughly $2 billion in tax relief and related incentives. 

Yet the real sting for taxpayers came when Commissioner Chris Boles, moments after voting in favor of the package, tried to justify the decision with a nod to The Giving Tree—the oft-maligned children’s book—and then admitted he didn’t fully grasp the comparison.

“You have a seed, you cultivate it, it yields returns over time, and it accomplishes all these things,” Boles explained. “In a sense, this ballpark is like The Giving Tree.”

As Neil deMause notes on his Field of Schemes blog, that’s not how the story goes: “The boy doesn’t plant a seed that becomes a tree; he shows up, discovers the tree, eats its apples, climbs its trunk, ultimately cuts it down, and as an old man sits on its stump.”

In this instance, the taxpayers of Hillsborough County may be cast as the tree in the tale.

The Next Indiana?

Okay, we can’t fill the entire newsletter with baseball chatter.

In the era of transfer windows and Name, Image, and Likeness money, which program has the best odds of mirroring Indiana’s remarkable rise from Big Ten doormat to national title contender? Could it be the University of Virginia, once the historic home of Thomas Jefferson’s ideas?

Virginia routed N.C. State, 34–6, in one of the standout results of opening-week college football, and The Athletic’s Ralph D. Russo hints they could be a Cinderella story this season. “A direct line can be drawn from Indiana to Virginia regarding roster-building strategy. It centers on experience, production, and fit when coach Tony Elliott’s staff taps the transfer portal,” he writes. “Or perhaps Kentucky, another basketball powerhouse, might pivot to football glory as well?”

These underdog runs are thrilling precisely because they’re so rare, so don’t get carried away. ESPN’s college football simulations peg Virginia’s chances at a modest 1.7 percent to win it all, while Kentucky sits around 1 percent to challenge the SEC’s top dogs. Dare to dream, students!

Replay of the Week

As a Phillies devotee, I’ll admit a bias here—but their ninth-inning run in Anaheim on Friday night delivered a defensive gem that saved the game, followed by a sudden, game-winning grand slam. Have you ever seen a sequence like that?

All the swings of emotion during an outrageous top of the 9th in Anaheim 😱 pic.twitter.com/S71Dd50G7t

— MLB (@MLB) August 29, 2026

That’s all for this week. Catch the real games this weekend: the Minnesota state amateur baseball championships, which roll on through Labor Day.