Why Ohtani’s $75 Soda Cup is the Best Deal in Sports 🥤

Look, I don’t want to get into a debate over which economic system is best. Socialism, capitalism, feudalism — who knows?

But I will say, there is no more powerful economic force in our modern world than a terrible baseball team. Exhibit A: Minnesota Twins. They’re projected to lose 90 games this year, so what do they do?

Roll out $2 beers and concessions before Friday home games, $1 hot dogs on Tuesdays, and $5 student tickets until May 14. You can legitimately go to a game for under $10, which hasn’t been possible since 1960.

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: Why Ohtani’s $75 Soda Cup is the Best Deal in Sports

📉 Biggest Loser: The Craziest Scandal in College Football History

🏆 Winner’s Circle: The Truth Behind the Best-Designed Stadium in Sports

This $75 cup is one of the best deals in all of sports (but not for the reason you might think).

New Product: On Opening Day 2026, the Los Angeles Dodgers made headlines when they started selling a Limited Edition Shohei Ohtani souvenir Cup for a whopping $75.

Now, expensive Ohtani collectibles are nothing new, as evidenced by the fact that over the last three months, more than 37,000 of his trading cards have been sold on the secondary market, which is 20,000 more than the next person on the list

Lopsided Math: However, as many fans pointed out, even though the cup claimed to include free refills, that offer was only valid for that specific game. And when you consider the fact that a regular soda at Dodger Stadium costs $12, that means someone would have to drink more than 6 full, 32-oz cups of soda just to make their money back.

That’s why, after significant blowback from fans, the Dodgers updated the offer the very next day, lowering the price of the actual cup to $69 and offering fans free refills throughout the entire season.

Supply and Demand: Now, almost immediately after this change, these cups sold out, in part because with the updated pricing, after your 6th soda, you’d basically be drinking for free for the rest of the season:

$68.99/$11.99 = 5.75 sodas to break even

Still, it’s not actually the lower prices that make this cup such an incredible deal.

That’s because, given the market for Shohei Ohtani-themed collectibles, these cups are currently reselling on places like eBay for as high as $300 each. Meaning you could have bought this cup for $69 at the beginning of the season, gone to a couple of games to get your free soda, and then sold it for a 334% profit.

Not a bad return on your investment.

The craziest scandal in football history is one you definitely haven’t heard about, but it might go down as one of my favorite stories of all time.

By the Numbers: This is Kevin Hart, and in 2004, the 300-pound high school freshman moved to a small town of just 13,000 people called Fernley, just outside of Reno, Nevada. Growing up, Hart was always too heavy to play tackle football, but after being taken under the wing of Fernley’s head coach, Mark Hodges, the 6’4”, now 325-pound sophomore quickly turned into an all-state level offensive lineman.

This resulted in Hart receiving dozens of admittedly generic recruiting letters from D1 schools across the country, including Washington, Oregon, and Nevada. Fernley High School had never produced a D1 football recruit, so as the college letters kept flowing in, Hart, his coaches, and his parents were happy to tell everyone that he was going to become the first.

Ghosted for Grades: But just as Hart was entering his senior year, the harsh reality set in that that might not be the case.

While Hart was bragging to anyone that would listen that he was going D1, the truth was his GPA was a ghastly 1.8, just high enough to be eligible, but far too low to ever get accepted into any of the schools that were recruiting him, and Hart knew that.

Even though he was getting invited to camps at schools like Oregon and Washington, once their coaches saw his transcripts, they never called him back.

However, not wanting to ruin the excitement of becoming his school’s first-ever D1 recruit, Hart didn’t admit that fact to anyone, not even his parents, and instead finished his all-state senior year telling people that he had full-ride offers to:

When in reality, not a single coach from any of those schools had ever even called him. But at this point, Hart was fully caught up in his lie. Meaning his only choices were to:

Unraveling: In the end, Hart decided that on National Signing Day, in front of 900 people in his school’s gym, he would commit to Cal on live TV, even though he had never received an offer from the school.

Now, obviously, it didn’t take long for word to get back to Cal that a player they had never even talked to just committed to their school on a full-ride scholarship. So, later that night, Hart came clean to everyone, including his parents, about the 10-month lie he had been living.

In the end, Hart’s high school coach got fired for failing to properly oversee the recruiting process, and Hart himself ended up at a local community college, officially marking the end of one of the most outrageous sports scandals of all time.

Target Field is one of the best-designed stadiums in all of sports, and I have the receipts to back it up.

Wasted Space: I recently saw a video of the Royals’ Kauffman Stadium on an off day and thought to myself, “Why does every stadium look like this?

Sure, all of this parking is probably convenient on game day, but during the other 284 days a year, this sea of over 19,000 parking spots, which is equivalent to the size of 84 baseball fields, just sits completely empty.

However, this problem isn’t unique.

In fact, these days, MLB stadiums are specifically built to be surrounded by an average of 6,000-8,000 parking spots, a direct result of the fact that of the last 5 MLB stadiums built, four are located outside their city’s downtown:

But what if there was a better way to design a ballpark?

Minneapolis Mentality: Well, that’s the exact question the city of Minneapolis asked when it decided to build Target Field in 2007.

See, after playing 12 seasons in the Metrodome, Twins owner Carl Pohlad publicly declared that the multipurpose stadium was “economically obsolete” and quickly released renderings for a new, retractable-roof stadium to be built less than a mile away from the old one along the bank of the Mississippi River.

The only problem was, as the state’s second richest citizen with an estimated net worth of $2 billion, local and state government officials believed that Pohlad should have to pay for his own stadium and quickly rejected any proposal that asked for public money.

This kicked off a 12-year-long saga that included Pohlad threatening to relocate or even fold the team altogether, which finally ended in 2006 after the team and county agreed to build a new, $552 million ballpark right on the edge of downtown.

There was just one problem: a baseball stadium didn’t actually fit here.

Silver Lining: Even today, most architects believe that a modern-MLB facility requires at least 16-20 acres of land, but the site the team and county agreed on was just 8 acres, the smallest in the entire league. Not to mention, it was surrounded on all sides by three highways and a train track.

But it turns out this initial limitation was one of the best things that could have happened to the new stadium.

Not only did the designers of the stadium reclaim valuable downtown real estate by simply building parts of it on top of the existing highway, but by locating it in such close proximity to existing rail lines and a newly completed light-rail station, the stadium suddenly required far less parking than most modern facilities.

This has not only enabled upwards of 20% of all Twins fans to take public transportation to a game and given the venue a top 5 walkability score, but it’s also resulted in a ballpark that just looks far better than any of the new ones being built today.

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

I just posted a video with my friend and NBA Broadcaster, Carlo Jimenez, about what it’s like to be a professional broadcaster. Even if you don’t want to call games yourself someday, I consider this a certified “enjoyable watch™️.”