Moneyball: Major League Baseball is in a tough spot

12/9/21 7:00PM

Baseball used to regularly be described as America's favorite national pastime. Sadly, that phrase is getting closer to retirement with every passing year, as attendance at Major League Baseball games has been falling steadily since 2007.

So it's unfortunate for baseball fans that the collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the players' union has expired — meaning the first lockout in more than 25 years. The lockout prevents players from using team facilities, and free agents can't sign new contracts until a new agreement is reached.

‍Moneyball

‍The issue at play is, unsurprisingly, money. Unlike the NBA or NFL, the MLB has no direct mechanism for players to benefit from rising league revenues. That's partly contributed to why the median salary for MLB players has fallen by 30% since 2015. During that time the median NBA salary was up 50%.

One of the core issues is the disparity between teams. The New York Yankees pull in 10x the local revenue of the smallest teams, making negotiations a little unbalanced. As the Oakland Athletics General Manager put it in Moneyball: _"_There are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then, there's 50 feet of crap. And then there's us" — that dynamic remains true today.

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The BBC has become the world’s top news website... by collapsing a little less than its competition

Press Gazette just published its annual look at the biggest news sites in the world across all languages; for the most part, it doesn’t make for particularly pretty reading.

The journalism industry publication’s latest update, which is based on estimates provided by Similarweb for May, found that 37 of the world’s 50 most visited news sites saw their reach shrink. Press Gazette highlighted that American outlets have been hit particularly hard by declining Google traffic compared to European counterparts, owing to the platform’s AI features rolling out earlier in the US.

Even the BBC, having climbed the rankings from last year to top the 2026 chart — reportedly in part thanks to Similarweb’s decision to combine the “.co.uk” and “.com” versions of the URL, given that the sites redirect to each other depending on the user’s location — showed a 1.9% decline from last year.

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Drake whiffs on an expected No. 1 on Spotify

Drake started at the bottom and he’s here, but not quite at the top... of Spotify, at least.

It’s been nearly three weeks since Drake dropped his three surprise albums — “Iceman,” “Habibti,” and “Maid of Honour.” Heading into the month, prediction markets were rating it a near certainty, a 98% chance, that Drake’s sonic onslaught was enough to snag the No. 1 slot on Spotify at least once in June.

But, while he surpassed the late Michael Jackson and took up three slots on the Billboard album chart at once, his newly released songs haven’t quite cracked the popular music-streaming platform’s top charts, and market seem to think the moment has passed.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

Spotify’s “Top Songs - Global” chart currently show that Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” which is more than four decades old, Justin Bieber’s “Beauty and a Beat,” which climbed back to the top of Spotify charts following his Coachella set in the spring, Olivia Rodrigo’s new angsty love song “The Cure,” and BTS’s “Swim” are all ahead of Drake’s “STFU Janice” from his “Iceman” album.

While Spotify previously reported last month that Drake’s “Make Them Cry” was the most streamed album in a single day this year, that was later revealed to be a data error.

Prediction markets currently show traders are betting there’s only a 15% chance Drake will have a No. 1 song on Spotify in June.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift is in the lead at 98% — a day before the release of her new original song “I Knew It, I Knew You,” which she wrote and performed for Disney and Pixar’s upcoming “Toy Story 5” — followed by Olivia Rodrigo, whose highly anticipated album “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love” comes out next Friday.