Tariffs Come for Your Jerseys, Gym Clothes, and Sports Team
Plus: Formula 1, Backyard Baseball, and The Great 8 vs. The Great One.
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.
Locker Room Links
- 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:
— Dale Earnhardt Jr. (@DaleJr) April 4, 2025
Tariffs Tank Sports
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.
Don't miss sports coverage from Jason Russell and Reason.
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.
The Great 8 vs. The Great One
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.)
Regulations and Red Bull
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@reason.com.
I'm Gonna Hit a Touchdown
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.
Replay of the Week
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:
Caity doing her best Tom Curren impression
The @surfcity #ElSalvadorPro is LIVE ???? Tune in at https://t.co/ie0ZfMWjFw pic.twitter.com/KHtiy4O1hB
— World Surf League (@wsl) April 5, 2025
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.
