Baseball in 2015: Record High Revenues
e 2015 Major League Baseball season gets underway on Monday with the sport dealing with an aging, shrinking television audience—yet league revenues, franchise valuations and player salaries are all rising faster than the stock market.
With the average MLB team now worth more than $1.2 billion and the average salary breaking $4 million, let's take a look at how the business of baseball has changed in the last few years.
A shrinking, aging television audience
"The five most-watched World Series aired in the five-year period between 1978 and 1982," said Brad Adgate of Horizon Media. All five averaged more than 38 million viewers. Contrast that with the 2014 World Series audience—a skinny 13.8 million—down 64 percent despite an increased U.S. population. Media buyer Adgate said that's "unlike the Super Bowl, which has set an audience record in five of the last six years."
Related: Madison Bumgarner: Exhibit A in Baseball’s Screwball Salary System
Not only is the audience declining, but it's aging too: Last year's World Series had a viewer with a median age of 55.6—a new high. Just five years prior, it had been sub-50 at 49.9, and was in the 44-46 range during the early 1990s.
Chart of the Day: Long Way to Go on Coronavirus Testing
The White House on Friday unveiled plans for a new effort to ramp up testing for Covid-19, which experts say is an essential part of limiting the spread of the virus. This chart from Vox gives a sense of just how far the U.S. has to go to catch up to other countries that are dealing with the pandemic, including South Korea, the leading virus screener with 3,692 tests per million people. The U.S., by comparison, has done about 23 tests per million people as of March 12.
After Spending $2 Billion, Air Force Bails Out on Planned Upgrades of B-2 Bombers
The Air Force has scrapped a planned upgrade of its B-2 stealth bomber fleet — even after spending $2 billion on the effort — because defense contractor Northrup Grumman didn’t have the necessary software expertise to complete the project on time and on budget, Bloomberg’s Anthony Capaccio reports, citing the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer.
Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, told reporters that the nearly $2 billion that had already been spent on the program wasn’t wasted because “we are still going to get upgraded electronic displays.”
Big Hurdle for Sanders’ Plan to Cancel Student Debt
Bernie Sanders wants to eliminate $1.6 trillion in student debt, to be paid for by a tax on financial transactions, but doing so won’t be easy, says Josh Mitchell of The Wall Street Journal.
The main problem for Sanders is that most Americans don’t support the plan, with 57% of respondents in a poll last fall saying they oppose the idea of canceling all student debt. And the politics are particularly thorny for Sanders as he prepares for a likely general election run, Mitchell says: “Among the strongest opponents are groups Democrats hope to peel away from President Trump: Rust Belt voters, independents, whites, men and voters in rural areas.”
Number of the Day: $7 Million
That’s how much Michael Bloomberg is spending per day in his pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, according to new monthly filings with the Federal Election Commission. “In January alone, Bloomberg dropped more than $220 million on his free-spending presidential campaign,” The Hill says. “That breaks down to about $7.1 million a day, $300,000 an hour or $5,000 per minute.”