How Sports Tickets Got So Expensive—Or Did They?

Plus: regulating college sports, forgiving baseball’s legends, and Happy Gilmore 2

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 baseball (obviously you could scrimp even more by not eating at the stadium and/or skipping the merchandise). Prices for the flailing New York Yankees are even cheaper—You can grab four tickets to their home game against the Minnesota Twins on August 11 for under $20 a ticket.

Osborn, though, is from Nebraska (he's an independent running for Senate, again). I'm sorry it's not a big enough market for an MLB team. Lucky for Osborn, tickets to the Omaha Storm Chasers and Lincoln Saltdogs are even cheaper than Dodgers tickets.

College Sports Saved Forever?

Seems like there's big news every week on the regulation of college sports—which says a lot about the mess the NCAA has made. The big news last week was President Donald Trump's executive order "Saving College Sports."

Spoiler alert: The executive order does not save college sports, or do much at all. "It's not a law, it can't replace a law and any new policies that come from agencies will be challenged in court," attorney Michael McCann posted. For example, the order doesn't prohibit pay-for-play payments, it just says it's Trump's opinion that universities shouldn't allow it. Of course, some NCAA members know all too well what can happen when a university doesn't follow Trump's wishes. The order also asks the attorney general and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair to use litigation and "other actions" to "stabilize and preserve college athletics." That could mean litigation against state laws in conflict with NCAA rules, and it's a sign the Trump administration doesn't want the FTC to entertain antitrust challenges to the NCAA.

While the order calls for consultation with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, it does not call for special rules or even government funding for those sports, despite the wishes of some (the national debt held by the public is $29.4 trillion, people).

It didn't get as much attention, but news about the SCORE Act is what you should keep your eye on. The bill advanced through two House committees (albeit with only Republicans voting in favor) and is on its way to the House floor. It prevents college athletes from being recognized as employees and, hence, collective bargaining is out of the question. It would also override any state laws that restrict name, image, and likeness payments (though schools and conferences could still restrict these). The NCAA and athletic conferences would get antitrust protections.

If the SCORE Act passes the House, it would come up against dueling approaches in the Senate: one from Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) and another from Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.).

As I wrote last month, we do not, under any circumstances, need politicians more involved in sports (even if that's what keeps this newsletter going).

Highly respected college sports insider to my DM:

Are we supposed to follow state law, the presidential executive order, the House settlement, Federal law, University policies, NCAA bylaws, or the College Sports Commission? Let me know.

GOLD ⚡️

— Mitch Gilfillan (@mitchgilfillan) July 24, 2025

Forgiving Hall of Famers

"Can something so gloriously frivolous as baseball teach us a thing or two about the lost art of forgiveness?"

My colleague Matt Welch, a perennial attendee of the Baseball Hall of Fame's induction weekend, wrote about Dick Allen and Dave Parker, both posthumously enshrined last weekend.

Allen, Welch writes, was known for "regularly skipping practices, showing up late to games, refusing to play when managers asked, boozing and smoking at work, hanging out at the racetrack, and on three separate occasions skipping out on his team," while Parker "developed one of the most consequential cocaine habits in Major League history" and even got his dealer onto team trips.

But they were also well-known for being awesome baseball players. "At their peaks, Allen and Parker were not only in the conversation for best player in the game, they each had a claim on being the sport's biggest badass," as Welch writes. Among other achievements, Allen had 201 hits in 1964 en route to the rookie-of-the-year award and Parker finished five seasons in the top five of MVP voting (with the top spot once). 

Allen and Parker won't be the only players with checkered pasts to get into the Hall of Fame. Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson will surely follow soon, and perhaps steroid-using legends like Barry Bonds after that. Welch quotes the great baseball historian/analyst Bill James: "For very good reasons, we do not nurture hatred. We let things pass. This leads history to be forgiving. Perhaps it is right, perhaps it is wrong, but that is the way it is."

Happy Gilmore Fore 2

If you thought the original Happy Gilmore movie was absurd, the sequel ratchets up the absurdity by three notches, one for each decade since the original came out. But absurdity can also be fun, and I enjoyed two hours of Happy Gilmore 2. Not everyone will like it. But unlike most unnecessary sequels (which this one is, to be sure), it's not overly reliant on callbacks to the original—and I laughed harder at the sequel than the original.

There are an astounding number of celebrity cameos in this movie, so many it was actually distracting. It really has almost every famous golfer a casual fan could think of (except Tiger Woods). Where else are you going to get Travis Kelce, Jack Nicklaus, and Adam Sandler in the same scene? The MVP, though, is Scottie Scheffler for being such a good sport. (I hope those chicken fingers were worth it, Scottie.)

I would not have paid to see Happy Gilmore 2 in a movie theater. Thankfully it's available on Netflix at your convenience. I promise it will be better than Air Bud Returns.

Replay of the Week

Baseball is the best.

HOW?!

You have to see what just happened in the Marlins-Brewers game ???? pic.twitter.com/mKNSP5xSBD

— MLB (@MLB) July 25, 2025

That's all for this week. Let this be your notice that it's ESPN 8: The Ocho weekend with soap hockey, donk toss, T.rex races, and much more on TV. (What in the world is "coffin wars"?)