Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Be sure to park your train in a spot with a great view today—especially if you can find a great view of a game, because we’re starting off this newsletter with higher prices for sports tickets. Then we’ll talk about regulations on college sports coming out of Washington, D.C., discuss baseball’s Hall of Famers with sketchy pasts, and close with a brief review of Happy Gilmore 2. Let’s get to it!

Locker Room Links

• “NYC shooter intended to target the NFL offices; went to the wrong floor. Played high school football; had a note in his pocket about CTE.”
• The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee banned transgender women from women’s sports.
• Venus Williams joked(?) that she made her tennis comeback at 45 years old because she wants the health insurance. But if true, it really means playing was a better option than enrolling in Obamacare, as the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon points out.
• A Venezuelan baseball team of 13- to 16-year-olds got caught up in the travel ban.
• Unrelated, I can’t believe a Little League suspension ended up in court.
• Someone is trying to use a 300-year-old law to recoup their sports betting losses in Washington, D.C.
• RIP Hulk Hogan: A nice remembrance here from a wrestling skeptic, and another one here from a fanatic.
• Elsewhere in Reason: This week’s Reason Roundtable podcast also included some Hulk Hogan discussion.
• Good news!
  

  NCAA Tournament expansion ‘growing more unlikely,’ per report https://t.co/pE78wmfX0F

  — Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) July 25, 2025

The Price Is Right?

Things are getting more expensive, and sports are getting more expensive faster than everything else.

This thread on X is a typical example of the complaints.

Why is it so f*%king expensive to take your family to a Major League Baseball game?

After the tickets, parking, food, and drinks, you could easily spend hundreds, if not a thousand dollars for just one game.

Let’s talk about why this has happened to America’s pastime:????

— Dan Osborn (@osbornforne) July 4, 2025

As you’d expect, the blame is pinned on greedy billionaires who just want to make as much money as possible, as well as shifting “dynamic prices” that change as demand changes. (People hate prices, but we need them for the economy to function.)

But instead of blaming the billionaires, maybe there’s someone else who should take the blame: the fans.

There are more and more of us sports fans, and as we’ve all collectively gotten richer, we’ve decided to spend more of our money on watching our favorite sports teams. The number of games and seating capacity at those games (i.e., supply) haven’t meaningfully increased in the last 25 years, so as interest (i.e., demand) has gone up, prices have gone up too.

The thread above from Dan Osborn laments ticket prices from 1999 to 2020 growing twice as fast as regular inflation. His data on that, from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, are sound. But it doesn’t consider how much richer we’ve gotten: Our disposable personal income grew even faster than inflation and ticket prices. We chose to spend some of that extra spending money on sporting events, and ticket prices naturally went up.

Something funny happened after Osborn’s 21-year period, from January 2020 to the present: Regular inflation caught up to ticket prices, and ticket prices mostly stayed the same (with a lot of variance in the last five years, but only up 2 percent from January 2020 to June 2025). 

Osborn’s data on another complaint are not sound, though. “After the tickets, parking, food, and drinks, you could easily spend hundreds, if not a thousand dollars for just one game.” A thousand? Even for baseball’s most expensive teams, that’s a stretch.

Let’s say you want to take your family of four to a Los Angeles Dodgers game this month. They have a Sunday afternoon game against the Toronto Blue Jays (one of the best teams in baseball!). The cheapest tickets right now are roughly $50 a person, or $200 for the family (including fees). Parking for one car adds another $35. Even if you budget $100 for concessions and another $100 for souvenirs, that’s still under $450 total for a family of four to see the most expensive team in baseba

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Article from Reason.com

Reason Magazine

The Reason Magazine website is a go-to destination for libertarians seeking cogent analysis, investigative reporting, and thought-provoking commentary. Championing the principles of individual freedom, limited government, and free markets, the site offers a diverse range of articles, videos, and podcasts that challenge conventional wisdom and advocate for libertarian solutions. Whether you’re interested in politics, culture, or technology, Reason provides a unique lens that prioritizes liberty and rational discourse. It’s an essential resource for those who value critical thinking and nuanced debate in the pursuit of a freer society.