Morgan Stanley Ideas Podcast

For the past 40 years, Major League Baseball’s off-season has been dominated by a frenzied bidding war to sign available free agents. But this year, everything changed—the free-agent market froze. For months, almost none of the 200 free agents were signed. So what happened? And what does the market shift mean for the future of America’s pastime?This season on the Ideas Podcast, we’ve been exploring unexpected markets. In this episode, we’ll look at what happens when a seemingly healthy market unexpectedly collapses. We talk to Ben Reiter, a journalist at Sports Illustrated who made a crazy prediction in 2014—that the Houston Astros, the then-worst team in baseball, would win the 2017 World Series. That Ben’s call came true wasn’t just a fluke—but reflected how teams now approach hiring players, particularly free agents. Then, J.C. Bradbury, a professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, takes us deep into the economics of baseball to explain why it suddenly has become good business to field a