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08-04-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Tariffs Come for Your Jerseys, Gym Clothes, and Sports Team
Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Don't forget to take your absolutely enormous bunny to a baseball game this season. Apologies if you were looking for a safe space from worrying about tariffs and the stock markets, but that's our lead story today—fans (or haters) of the A's, Atlanta Braves, Los Angeles Dodgers, Manchester United, and New York Knicks will be especially interested. We'll also talk about hockey's GOATS, Formula 1 regulations, and a kids baseball video game. But first, a final update on the Reason Friends and Family Bracket Contest. Many congratulations to the Florida Gators and Connecticut Huskies on their titles. In the men's bracket pool, none other than John Stossel beat out the competition. Between 19 Emmy Awards, five awards from the National Press Club, and a Reason Friends and Family Bracket Contest championship, Stossel has accumulated quite the trophy cabinet. On the women's side, Jimmy Kline won by continuing his aforementioned miracle run, missing just one team in the Elite Eight and predicting the tournament perfectly from then on. Thank you to everyone who joined! We'll be in touch with the winners by email. Ken Pomeroy says "NIL and the transfer portal has made college hoops better than ever." Duke's Khaman Maluach might be a top NBA draft pick—or he might get deported. Baltimore sues DraftKings and FanDuel for allegedly exploiting gamblers. Diana Taurasi will get the docuseries treatment from Amazon Prime Video. Like most businesses, Steph Curry's Thirty Ink can't figure out how to build in San Francisco. Rob Manfred interviewed about the future of baseball. Elsewhere in Reason: The new prohibitionists hijacking federal alcohol guidelines A Lamar Jackson legal filing caused Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s racing team to stop using a certain style of the number eight: The sports world isn't the most important victim of President Donald Trump's trade war, but there's a sports angle to everything, and this is a sports newsletter, so here we go. (For my colleagues' excellent nonsports coverage of the tariffs' harm, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) The clearest victim in the sports world are sporting goods companies: Nike, Adidas, and Puma stocks are all down 10-plus percent in the last five days of stock market trading, as of Monday's close. The same is true of Amer Sports—headquartered in Finland but owned by a Chinese conglomerate, they own some well-known brands like Wilson, Louisville Slugger, and Arc'teryx. Golf brands have been hit too, with similar losses for Acushnet Company (Titleist, FootJoy) and Topgolf Callaway Brands. Those are all worse than the 9.4 percent drop in the Dow Jones over the last five days. "When times get bad, people are going to spend their money on groceries and health care first [before] entertainment," Brendan Coffey, a sports finance reporter at Sportico, tells me. Sports teams are fortunate that so much of their revenue comes from TV rights deals. Vivid Seats, the secondary marketplace for tickets, is down 14 percent in the last five trading days. StubHub has indefinitely postponed plans for its stock to go public. Stock in Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, is down 8.5 percent—and Live Nation's parent company, Liberty Media, is down 6.4 percent (Liberty Media also owns Formula 1). But how will this affect professional sports teams? The Dodgers may import a lot of talent, but they're not paying tariffs on their Japanese payroll (hopefully Shohei Ohtani's White House visit didn't give Trump any ideas). Publicly traded teams like the Atlanta Braves have fared relatively better, but they're still down 8.4 percent in the last five days. Madison Square Garden Sports, owners of the New York Knicks, are also down 8.4 percent (although chairman James Dolan's other big venture, Sphere Entertainment, is down 17 percent). Even foreign soccer teams are taking a hit: Manchester United is down 4 percent. Then there are the teams whose owner's business empires stand to lose the most. A's fans, you're going to want to look away. When I asked Coffey if any team owners stood out as making their money through trade with China, Coffey said, "The first one that comes to mind is…John Fisher of the A's." Fisher's parents co-founded Gap, whose stock is now down 9 percent in the last five days. The vast majority of Gap's factories are in Asia, with only a few in the U.S. (As Coffey said, it's not like Fisher needed another excuse to limit spending on his team.) Some of these businesses are handling the tariffs better than others, but every stock mentioned here is still down. The trade war is hurting everyone, the sports world included. Is Alexander Ovechkin now the greatest hockey player of all time? Ovechkin scored career goal 895 on Sunday (in a 4–1 loss to Patrick Roy's middling New York Islanders), passing Wayne Gretzky's record. The Capitals have five games left in the regular season, so 900 is within reach (postseason goals don't count for this record, which is silly). A few more seasons of 33 goals each and Ovechkin, now 39 years old, could hit 1,000 goals, which would be truly insane. But Wayne Gretzky was still better. Ovechkin may be the better goalscorer, but Gretzky was the better all-around player. He's got the assists record with 1,963, while Ovechkin's 724 assists don't even crack the top 50 players in NHL history. Ovechkin's +/- rating is only +62, while Gretzky's is +520, suggesting Gretzky was a bit more helpful on defense. These are imperfect stats, sure. As Gretzky pointed out, comparing the eras is nearly impossible. And while Ovechkin scores many of his goals from the same spot, everyone else in the NHL could do that too, and they haven't scored as many as Ovechkin. Then there's the politics. Ovechkin has long been a supporter of Vladimir Putin. To be fair, if Ovechkin spoke out against him, his Russian family and friends would probably start dying in mysterious ways. But does Ovechkin really need to have Putin in his Instagram profile photo? Canadian academic and former athlete Bruce Kidd put it well in an interview with Sportsnet: "I hold many ideas simultaneously: I admire him as an athlete. I hate the fact that he's an advocate for a war criminal. And I come from a culture that says we should still conduct sport with people on the other side as a way of lowering the temperature and developing cultural understanding." (Canadians, for what it's worth, aren't happy with Gretzky's politics either.) Anyhow, this Red Wings fan says Gordie Howe is the best of all time anyway. (Full credit to Gretzky for wearing Howe's No. 9 on a pin during Sunday's game.) Red Bull Racing is winning—and also deeply mired in trouble. So it goes in Formula 1 when you have one driver who's a four-time world champion and a rotating cast of second drivers who can't manage to finish in the top 10. But this wasn't always the case. Reason intern Rossana Pineyro wrote about Red Bull blaming its woes on drivers instead of its car, and how a regulation change is likely to blame. The rules for 2024, she writes, "meant to level the playing field, disrupted Red Bull's aerodynamic advantage after a dominant 2023 season, slowing down its vehicles." The team then "configured its vehicles to suit its main driver, Max Verstappen," leaving its second drivers in the dust. Sergio Perez struggled last year and then got cut in the offseason. Liam Lawson was only given two races before he got the axe. This weekend only exemplified Red Bull's problem. Verstappen won the Japanese Grand Prix, his first win of the season. But his new teammate, Yuki Tsunoda, could only manage 15th in qualifying and 12th in the grand prix. If you have any thoughts on the Red Bull situation, I'd love to hear from you. I'm a huge F1 fan and always looking for more people to discuss it with! Let me know what you think at freeagent@ I'm happy to report the new mobile version of Backyard Baseball is good, fun, and worth $5 if you have time to play. Any kid who grew up in the late '90s or early 2000s and loved baseball probably played Backyard Baseball. Sequels featured real MLB players, with kid versions of stars like Sammy Sosa, Nomar Garciaparra, and Bobby Higginson playing alongside legends of the franchise like Pablo Sanchez, Pete Wheeler, and Kiesha Phillips. Backyard Soccer and Backyard Football were also staples in the Russell household. The new version for iOS is a remastered version of the 1997 original—so yes, Pablo can still hit a home run into the pool at Steele Stadium. Some initial glitches seem to have been solved. Playing with the sound on so you get all the original commentary and kid chatter is vastly superior to playing on mute. It's well worth the small price for a little nostalgia. My colleague Jeff Luse, Free Agent's resident editor, informs me the World Surf League Championship Tour is in full swing, calling it "arguably the freest sport." This replay of the week is for you, Jeff. Here's the top ranked woman in the world, Caity Simmers, doing her thing: Meanwhile, I almost slipped in the shower this morning. Me and Caity Simmers are not the same. That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the week, Western Michigan against Denver in the Frozen Four on Thursday. The post Tariffs Come for Your Jerseys, Gym Clothes, and Sports Team appeared first on
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
March Madness Isn't Dead
MIKE ZARRILLI/UPI/Newscom Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! No April Fools' jokes today, the Yankees' new bats are enough of a joke on their own. But if you can hit 84 mph on the odometer today, do it. Advertisement I've got more March Madness for you today, including some NIT thoughts. I also want to talk about NFL kickoffs and, separately, tattoos? But first, another update on the Reason Friends and Family Bracket Contest. There were 12 games in the men's basketball tournament since our last newsletter. Some guy named Jimmy Kline predicted all 12 correctly, launching himself to the top of the leaderboard. There were also 12 games on the women's side, which were all correctly predicted by me, your humble newsletter writer—but Jimmy Kline got 11 of those 12 right and is tied for the lead with two others. Each contest is coming down to the wire. Good luck! Locker Room Links RIP March Madness? I am reliably informed that March Madness is dead. The time of death was apparently Sunday, March 23, when people were grumpy about all the high-seeded chalk making it to the Sweet 16. The coroners have some thoughts about the cause of death. Advertisement Was it name, image, and likeness (NIL) payments to players? Conn Carroll argues as much at the Washington Examiner, my former employer: "As soon as a mid-major finds and develops a good player, that player then immediately leaves for a bigger school." Or is a unanimous Supreme Court decision to blame? National Review contributor Christian Schneider says so, writing, "In the 2021 case NCAA v. Alston, the court unanimously determined that college sports did not enjoy antitrust exemptions allowing them to deny benefits to student-athletes in the name of 'amateurism.'" Soon after came NIL payments, an expanded transfer portal, and, next year, direct payments from schools to players. Sky-high TV ratings beg to differ with the death certificate. Roughly 9.4 million viewers per game in the first two rounds would argue March Madness is alive and well. That's the highest viewership for the men's tournament in three decades. (Viewership was down from those numbers on the first night of the Sweet 16, but still 3 percent higher than last year. We're still waiting on more TV data from the rest of the weekend's games.) The women's side is usually chalky, and this year is no different with three No. 1 seeds in the Final Four. But TV ratings are still higher than usual—not as high as last year's Caitlin Clark–fueled popularity, but up 43 percent from 2023 (at least in the early rounds). Star power is a big help on the women's side, and there were arguably more stars in the women's bracket (JuJu Watkins, Hailey Van Lith, Paige Bueckers) than the men's (Cooper Flagg). Advertisement One year of chalk need not be the end of March Madness. It certainly wasn't in 2008 when every No. 1 seed made the Final Four. Soon after we had Butler and VCU in the same Final Four, followed by Wichita State (not to mention Florida Gulf Coast's "Dunk City" run into the Sweet 16 as a No. 15 seed). I covered the uncertainty last week, but I think March Madness will still be fun no matter what direction it goes in. I'm sorry some people aren't having fun with March Madness this year. Fans of mid-major Cinderellas are welcome to tune into the NIT instead. NCAA NITwits You know what's not getting millions of viewers per game? The National Invitation Tournament, which you know as the NIT, or The NCAA Tournament's Leftovers. The NIT might just be dead because of NCAA neglect. Advertisement Even the best NIT games have only gotten TV viewership in the 300,000s (thank you to Programming Insider for the data). I've hardly seen anything online about the NIT this year. The semifinals apparently feature basketball powerhouses like North Texas, UC Irvine, Loyola Chicago, and Chattanooga. Even with the first three rounds played on campuses, attendance has been pretty sparse, ranging from a paltry 672 attendees for UC Riverside vs. Santa Clara to almost 5,000 for Chattanooga against Bradley in the quarterfinals (still less than half capacity). Part of the NIT's problem is that it's got fresh new competition from the College Basketball Crown (CBC), a 16-team tournament that tipped off on Monday, including Georgetown and Villanova, plus five sub-.500 teams like Arizona State, Butler, and USC. The CBC's existence partially explains why there are no Big East, Big Ten, or SEC schools in the NIT. (Though several big schools, including Indiana, Ohio State, and Penn State, decided neither tournament was worth it.) The competition combines the glitz of hosting every game in Las Vegas with all the glamor of FS1 (with the semifinals onward on FOX). How can the NIT compete with that? The solution is easy: Give the NIT teams something to play for. The NCAA should give the NIT champion a guaranteed spot in the following year's NCAA tournament. Attendance, viewership, and intensity would go through the roof. The winner would have less to play for in the regular season, sure, but they'll still be playing for seeding—they won't want to end up as a No. 16 seed. The same prize would fix the women's equivalent, the Women's Basketball Invitation Tournament. It's a good idea that would make the NIT more fun at a time of year when people are obsessed with everything basketball-related. Make it happen, NCAA. Save Kickoffs Should kickoffs be fun and exciting, or a throwaway play that you can skip if you need to go to the bathroom? Probably the first one. Advertisement NFL owners are meeting this week to consider several proposed rule changes, including doubling down on last season's "dynamic" kickoffs. Under the traditional kickoffs, only 22 percent of kicks were being returned. This rose to 33 percent last season under the dynamic kickoff rules, which changed several things, including moving touchbacks forward to the 30-yard line—but those rules were only approved for one season. The NFL's competition committee proposes to keep the dynamic rules and move touchbacks to the 35-yard line, so kicking teams will have even more reason to avoid a touchback. The committee projects that 60 percent to 70 percent(!) of kickoffs will get returns if enacted. Traditionalists (including President Donald Trump, for what it's worth) hate dynamic kickoffs. But when kickers can easily hit the end zone, a dwindling return rate is only going to lead to the possibility of skipping kickoffs altogether for possessions that start at some predetermined yard line. Dynamic kickoffs (for which the premerger XFL deserves credit!) can save the kickoff. The Tattoos Aren't That Bad I'm not really a fan of tattoos or Michael Jordan jerseys, but I don't think you should get deported for having one. Advertisement Alas, that may be what happened to Jerce Reyes Barrios, a Venezuelan man who was seeking asylum in the United States. His attorney claims immigration officials used his tattoo of a soccer ball, a crown, and the word dios as part of their justification for deportation. Soccer fans might notice a resemblance to the crest of Real Madrid. The attorney says Reyes Barrios has a clean criminal record and a declaration from the tattoo artist verifying its meaning. Worse, apparently a Michael Jordan jersey or sneakers could also put someone at risk of being classified as a Venezuelan gang member subject to deportation. The White House claims this isn't true, but government documents seem to say otherwise. "No one should end up in an El Salvadorian prison because a cop misunderstood a tattoo," as Reason's Eric Boehm says. Replay of the Week The MLB post speaks for itself. The runner went on to score on the next ball in play, and that was enough for a 1–0 Padres victory. That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the week, Incarnate Word vs. Houston Christian in softball. The post March Madness Isn't Dead appeared first on
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25-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Labor Strife Looms Over MLB Opening Day
Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! May your baseball-related hopes spring eternal this week—for lo, the winter is past, Opening Day is almost here, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. We're talkin' baseball today, but we haven't forgotten about March Madness, we'll take a stop in golfland, and there's also a hockey goal that you've got to see to believe. Before we start, a Reason Friends and Family Bracket Contest update: Mark S. has a narrow lead on the men's side with 550 points, putting him in the 99.9th percentile of brackets on ESPN. You deserve a waffle party, Mark S.! On the women's side, we have a three-way tie of people at 570 points, but only in the 99th percentile—close, but not quite waffle party material, sorry friends. Our resident Los Angeles Angels superfan, Matt Welch, gets mentioned in the Los Angeles Times' rather dour preview of the Angels' season. College basketball's sweatiest coach is heading to Texas. A great defense of sports betting from Ben Domenech. The best team in a bracket this month might not be a basketball team—it might just be Wisconsin women's hockey. (They won the title in dramatic fashion on Sunday.) But this is the most important bracket news this month. Elsewhere in Reason: "Trump and Congress Have a Right and a Duty To Kill the Department of Education" RIP George Foreman: In honor of the late George Foreman (R.I.P.), here is one of the greatest posts of the early blogosphere: — Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) March 22, 2025 Things are going pretty well for Major League Baseball right now, which means they're probably about to badly screw it up. Attendance is trending upward, game times are shorter and more digestible, TV numbers are promising, and the league has approximately 1 billion fans in Japan (but seriously, the Tokyo Series games averaged 24 million viewers there, or roughly one-fifth of the country's population). The rule changes of 2023 seem to have accomplished their primary goals (despite my disapproval at the time). Yet a potential player lockout before the 2027 season looms over the sport, and there's a good chance a lockout goes a lot more poorly than the last one, which only narrowly avoided any lost games. Commissioner Rob Manfred is already playing a very weird expectations game, saying offseason lockouts should be the new norm: "It's actually a positive," because of the leverage. MLB Players Association Executive Director Tony Clark is already saying he expects a lockout too: "Unless I am mistaken, the league has come out and said there's going to be a work stoppage," seemingly referring to Manfred's comments. Baltimore Orioles owner David Rubenstein is asking for a salary cap, and there's no doubt other owners of midmarket teams agree. Fans and owners might call even louder for parity if the Los Angeles Dodgers win the World Series again with their $322 million payroll this season and Shohei Ohtani's $722 million contract. How are the Detroits, Baltimores, and Cincinnatis of the league supposed to compete with that? Betting odds imply the Dodgers have a roughly 30 percent chance of repeating as champions—thankfully, baseball is still pretty random, and high payrolls don't guarantee success (as the Yankees and Mets have shown with varying degrees of schadenfreude). But even if the big-payroll teams strike out and midmarkets dominate the playoffs, owners are still going to seek a salary cap. A ceiling on their payroll expenses would boost the value of their teams, probably even the ones in major markets. Clark said in 2023 the union is "never going to agree to a cap," and there's no reason to think he or the players have changed their minds. The owners and players already have their positions staked out. They can see the car crash coming two miles away. If this game of chicken ends poorly, they can only blame themselves. In the meantime, let's enjoy another great baseball season—except for you, A's and White Sox fans. You can probably skip this one. One distraction plaguing the league right now is the Tampa Bay Rays, their ownership, and their stadium—or the big gaping hole where their stadium roof is supposed to be. Manfred and some owners are pressuring Rays owner Stu Sternberg to sell the team, according to The Athletic's Evan Drellich. Sternberg has owned and operated the Rays for two decades. In that span, at least four different stadium plans have fallen apart—the last because the stadium literally fell apart. Now they're stuck playing at Steinbrenner Field, the spring training home of the Yankees, which seats just 11,000 people. Lucky(?) for them, the Rays only pulled 16,500 fans on average to home games last season. Sharks are circling in the form of ownership groups trying to buy the team. The league wants to keep the team in Tampa, but with different owners. Supposedly the market is too valuable, but attendance numbers beg to differ. Even with the small capacity, Opening Day still isn't quite sold out, even though cavernous, inconveniently located Tropicana Field had sold out Opening Days for the previous 18 years. If the Rays can't pull people to Steinbrenner Field's supposedly superior location (it's close to Raymond James Stadium and Tampa International Airport), perhaps the league should take that as a sign. Local governments haven't managed to agree with Sternberg on a stadium funding plan anyway (fortunately for taxpayers). Instead, St. Petersburg is stuck paying $22.7 million for a roof on a stadium that everybody hates and wants the team to leave as soon as possible. Sternberg, for his part, is pretty good at the baseball side of things. His staff has done a good job keeping the Rays competitive with low payrolls. There's no championships to speak of, but there are two American League pennants, and before last season the team had a five-year postseason streak. But the Rays need a stadium to play in. If Sternberg can't pay for one himself, it may be time to sell the franchise to someone who can. Upsets have been increasingly common in March Madness until this year's brackets put a hard stop on all that. On the men's side, every No. 1 seed made it through to the Sweet 16, No. 10 Arkansas is the only double-digit seed left, and there are a pair of No. 6 seeds that, semisurprisingly, beat No. 3 seeds. The women's bracket is typically more predictable with fewer upsets, and this year is no different: every No. 1, 2, and 3 seed remains alive, with three No. 5 seeds beating No. 4 seeds. In both brackets, every remaining school is either in the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, or SEC (except the Connecticut women as the Big East's lone representative). Is this a one-off after years of increasing upsets, or the start of a trend back to the best seeds cruising past the early rounds? As Nate Silver noted about the men's game, first-round upsets were more common from 2010–2024 than 1985–2009, and games had closer final scores, too. But the biggest increase in upsets was No. 11 seeds over No. 6 seeds—which are nice, but not exactly legendary upsets we'll never forget. It seems as though midmajor schools are getting fewer at-large bids, too, so even if there's a good upset by a No. 12 or 11 seed, it's more likely to be Generic SEC University instead of Northwest No-Name State University, which hasn't been in the tournament in 33 years. Which way will March Madness go from here? Will parity and upsets come back, or are they on the outs? The answer may be just as unpredictable as your bracket. The concept of watching professional golfers play on a simulator might seem weird until you realize TGL (TMRW Golf League) pits teams of golf's most famous players against each other. The stakes might not be as high as a major tournament, but Sunday at the Masters isn't going to have Xander Schauffele, Rickie Fowler, Collin Morikawa, and Tommy Fleetwood all in contention. TGL matches are fun to have on TV in the background while you do something else (like write a newsletter). Earlier this season, players seemed like they were having a little too much fun instead of stressing over the match, but the drama and tension of the playoffs have been more engaging. (The hammer rules remain confusing, and the in-arena music is a little annoying.) The TGL Finals are this week, with Atlanta taking the lead over New York on Monday in the best-of-three finals. Awkwardly, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy's teams didn't even make the playoffs. Have you watched any TGL this season? Let me know what you think at freeagent@ It's always fun when the puck gets batted into the goal out of midair. On Saturday, the St. Louis Blues batted the puck in midair three times, back-to-back-to-back, to take the lead against the Chicago Blackhawks. Keep watching for the overhead shot to truly appreciate how weird this is. Tic-Tac-GOAL ???? (This might be the weirdest goal in history) — B/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) March 22, 2025 We very nearly had a goalie fight, which would have been a guaranteed replay of the week. Alas. That's all for now. Enjoy watching the real game of the week coming up on Sunday, when UFL defending champs Birmingham Stallions take on the D.C. Defenders and (hopefully) a lengthy beer snake. The post Labor Strife Looms Over MLB Opening Day appeared first on
