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01 / 05
The Time Price of Watching Baseball Has Fallen to Seconds

Blog Post | Leisure

The Time Price of Watching Baseball Has Fallen to Seconds

Thanks to innovation, baseball games are almost free for billions of people.

Summary: Watching baseball has become much more affordable and accessible over the years. Thanks to innovations in telecommunications, baseball fans can enjoy thousands of games for less than the cost of one game a century ago.


A ticket to a Yankees game in 1923 cost $1.10. Unskilled workers back then were earning 22 cents an hour so it took them five hours of work to earn the money to buy a ticket. Blue-collar workers were earning 44 cents an hour so it only took them 2.5 hours.

Today you can buy a live stream package for every Major League Baseball game for $64.99. The season schedule generally consists of 162 games for each of the 30 teams for a total of 2,430 games, plus the postseason. The streaming package makes it less than 2.7 cents a game. That’s around 3 to 6 seconds of work depending on your skills.

Unskilled workers are earning $14.53 an hour today while blue-collar earn $33.39. That would make the season streaming package time price 4.48 hours and 1.95 hours respectively.

For less than the time price of one game in 1923 you get over 2,430 today. Enjoying baseball has become 242,000 percent more abundant. In the last 100 years, baseball innovation has grown at 8.1 percent compounded annually, doubling abundance every nine years.

Some have suggested that watching Major League Baseball has gotten more expensive over the years. The premium seat in the stadium is a status symbol of conspicuous consumption as Thorstein Veblen would say. It’s like a Rolex versus a Timex. You are not there to watch the game, you’re there to be watched. Vanity is always expensive.

Innovation in radio and then TV and now the internet has made watching baseball almost free for billions of people.

Pitcher Max Scherzer is the highest paid baseball player today with a $130 million 3-year contract. Babe Ruth was earning $52,000 a year in 1923. That was about 52 times greater than the typical blue-collar worker at the time. Max Scherzer’s $43 million a year puts him 643 times higher. Is Max really 10.9 times better than the Bambino?

Innovation allows Scherzer’s team to sell and resell his performance to everyone on the planet with advertisers paying much of the costs. TV also gives you close-up views and replays and stats you don’t really get at the stadium.

If you have the extra money and time to enjoy the status of attending a major league baseball game in person, you still have that choice today. But if you cannot afford to travel to Yankee Stadium, then enjoy what millions of entrepreneurs have created to help you watch the game in what many consider to be a much better experience.

Axios | Space

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Why it matters: This is the first all-woman space crew in U.S. history.

The flight was led by Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ commercial space company. Minutes after taking off, the crew experienced weightlessness. Then they soon safely returned to Earth.”

From Axios.

Associated Press | Leisure

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Other facets of the wine industry have also started adopting the tech, from using generative AI to create custom wine labels to turning to ChatGPT to develop, label and price an entire bottle.”

From Associated Press.

Financial Times | Science & Technology

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AI will help gardeners make sense of this data via a text interface similar to a chatbot, which visitors will be able to see on screens inside a mycelium-covered pavilion. ‘You’ll be able to have a conversation with the tree and say, ‘What do you need?’ or ‘How are you feeling?’ says Massey. ‘And the tree will respond.’

The idea is that this kind of data gathering and feedback makes for more efficient allocation of increasingly precious resources such as water. It should also improve plant resilience; one in 10 urban trees dies within a year of planting, says Ahn, and by the time you notice wilting branches and crispy leaves it may be too late. Massey hopes data from the show garden could feed into an app that home gardeners would use to track the health of their own plants. Users could manually input data, such as when they last watered a plant, to keep tabs on its condition.”

From Financial Times.

The Economist | Leisure

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“Board games have long fascinated artificial-intelligence (AI) researchers. They have clear rules, well-defined playing fields and objective winners and losers. This makes them perfect “sandpits” for training AI software. Sometimes, though, their rules contain glitches. Aficionados of Go will be familiar with ko fights—situations in which the basic rule set would permit a game to carry on for ever, and for which an exception had to be created. Avoiding similar problems in newly invented games is something AI can help with.

That, at least, is the experience of Alan Wallat, a board-game designer from London. His latest offering is Sirius Smugglers, in which interstellar merchants try to make an illicit profit. In the olden days, checking its rules would have involved lots of tests by human players, who would probably have wanted to be paid—in beer, perhaps, if not in cash.

Instead, he took his brainchild to Tabletop R&D, an AI startup, where a game-playing algorithm allowed him to play thousands of times in the blink of an eye. He was then able to scan the results for irregularities, statistical biases and any features that were under- or over-used.”

From The Economist.