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.
Tax Refunds Rebound
Smaller refunds in the first few weeks of the current tax season were shaping up to be a political problem for Republicans, but new data from the IRS shows that the value of refund checks has snapped back and is now running 1.3 percent higher than last year. The average refund through February 23 last year was $3,103, while the average refund through February 22 of 2019 was $3,143 – a difference of $40. The chart below from J.P. Morgan shows how refunds performed over the last 3 years.
Number of the Day: $22 Trillion
The total national debt surpassed $22 trillion on Monday. Total public debt outstanding reached $22,012,840,891,685.32, to be exact. That figure is up by more than $1.3 trillion over the past 12 months and by more than $2 trillion since President Trump took office.
Chart of the Week: The Soaring Cost of Insulin
The cost of insulin used to treat Type 1 diabetes nearly doubled between 2012 and 2016, according to an analysis released this week by the Health Care Cost Institute. Researchers found that the average point-of-sale price increased “from $7.80 a day in 2012 to $15 a day in 2016 for someone using an average amount of insulin (60 units per day).” Annual spending per person on insulin rose from $2,864 to $5,705 over the five-year period. And by 2016, insulin costs accounted for nearly a third of all heath care spending for those with Type 1 diabetes (see the chart below), which rose from $12,467 in 2012 to $18,494.
Chart of the Day: Shutdown Hits Like a Hurricane
The partial government shutdown has hit the economy like a hurricane – and not just metaphorically. Analysts at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said Tuesday that the shutdown has now cost the economy about $26 billion, close to the average cost of $27 billion per hurricane calculated by the Congressional Budget Office for storms striking the U.S. between 2000 and 2015. From an economic point of view, it’s basically “a self-imposed natural disaster,” CRFB said.
Chart of the Week: Lowering Medicare Drug Prices
The U.S. could save billions of dollars a year if Medicare were empowered to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies, according to a paper published by JAMA Internal Medicine earlier this week. Researchers compared the prices of the top 50 oral drugs in Medicare Part D to the prices for the same drugs at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which negotiates its own prices and uses a national formulary. They found that Medicare’s total spending was much higher than it would have been with VA pricing.
In 2016, for example, Medicare Part D spent $32.5 billion on the top 50 drugs but would have spent $18 billion if VA prices were in effect – or roughly 45 percent less. And the savings would likely be larger still, Axios’s Bob Herman said, since the study did not consider high-cost injectable drugs such as insulin.
