⚾️ The Only Youth Baseball Resort in America ($20M/yr)

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I just hit 3,000 subscribers on YouTube in 3 months. At this rate, I’ll get a silver play button (100K subscribers) by the time I’m 33.

My future kids are going to be so proud…

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: How the PWHL Almost Didn’t Happen

📉 Biggest Loser: Joe Rogan’s Alpha Brain is a $240M Scam (Allegedly)

🏆 Winner’s Circle: A Luxury Youth Baseball Facility That Makes More $$ Than Some Pro Teams

🗞 The Big Story

The most successful first season in women’s sports history almost didn’t happen, but after pulling it all off, they now have a much bigger problem to solve.

Background: The Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) just capped off its inaugural season with Minnesota winning the first-ever Walter Cup championship in front of thousands of fans. However, this almost seemed impossible a year ago.

Even one of the league’s advisors admits they had “extremely low” expectations for this season.

Six months before the season started, the start-up league led by Dodgers majority owner Mark Walter, his wife Kimbra, and Billie Jean King didn’t even have team names or arenas to play in.

Done is Better Than Perfect: Instead of waiting to play a full 32-game season at the end of 2024, the group decided to do their best in a 24-game season beginning on New Year’s Day.

And much to their surprise, the PWHL pulled impressive attendance and sponsorship numbers almost right away.

This includes sellout crowds of over 21,000 fans in Montreal, a record for women’s hockey, and a promising league average of 5,689 fans per game across 85 total games.

Building Momentum: Before the start of the season, the league had already secured sponsorships with brands like:

• Air Canada

• Bauer

• Rogers

By the season’s midpoint, the PWHL added many more sponsors, including Mattel’s Barbie brand, which created a co-branded merchandise collection during the playoffs.

Next Steps: Headed into the offseason, the PWHL’s top priorities include rolling out each team’s permanent brand identities and establishing a more comprehensive media distribution strategy.

The league has already said that team names and logos will be rolled out in August.

Elephant in the Room: However, solving their media distribution problem might be trickier. That’s because this year’s PWHL games were aired on various channels, including on RSNs like Bally Sports and NESN in the U.S., TSN in Canada, and even streaming for free on YouTube.

And since the league paid for all production costs, this was likely a major expense in Year 1.

Regardless, the staff of nearly 200 at the PWHL is already way ahead of schedule. And while the league hasn’t shared any specific figures, they say they’re already “in Year 4 of [their] financial plan.”

📉 Biggest Loser

How did we let Joe Rogan get away with this for so long?

Background: In 2010, Joe Rogan first mentioned that he was developing a pill with a pharmaceutical company called Onnit that would help “promote focus.”

Now, Onnit was founded by a self-described holistic health guru named Aubrey Marcus, but with the help of Rogan’s show and his millions of fans, Onnit was able to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of a pill called Alpha Brain.

Marcus and Rogan claimed that the pill supported memory, focus, and processing speed, based on a clinical study that the company self-funded in 2016.

The Science: However, the study proved the exact opposite when comparing Alpha Brain to a placebo:

• The two groups had no “statistically significant difference” in 25 of 26 tests.

• In many of those tests, the placebo group allegedly outperformed Alpha Brain.

• The only area in which Alpha Brain performed better than the placebo was verbal recall, and even then, the difference was so small that scientists now say it was likely “just due to chance.”

Continued Success: That didn’t stop Joe Rogan from shilling Alpha Brain as recently as six months ago when he called it the “most important supplement” he’s ever used.

Onnit claims to have sold more than 3 million bottles of this stuff at $80 per bottle, which means it’s done at least $240 million in sales. This success led to Unilever's acquisition of the company for upwards of $400 million in 2021.

Fallout: But now, a man in New York is suing the company, claiming that the supplement can’t claim to “improve memory” when its own study disproved this very fact.

A court filing shows that the defendant claimed to have spent $400 on the product in 2021 and is now seeking monetary damages based on the company’s $18M in revenue in New York since then.

And given that less successful companies have recently made settlement payments of $8M and $36M, it’s possible that Alpha Brain could be on the hook for millions more this year.

🛠 Behind the Scenes

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🏆 Winner’s Circle

This luxury youth baseball facility in the middle of nowhere, Texas, makes more money every year than some professional baseball teams. Let’s break it down.

Failed Horse Ranch: The Rocker B. Baseball Ranch sits 100 miles west of Dallas, Texas, and was founded in 2005 when Lance Byrd bought 320 acres of land to start a family horse-training ranch.

However, when his son started playing Little League, Byrd converted an old horse pen into a “premium” baseball field for his team to play games at.

This led Byrd to eventually build four fields so that he could host larger and larger tournaments.

Luxury Features: However, now the fields are the least impressive part of the ranch because Byrd has also built resort-style accommodations, including:

• Cabins and a lake-side bunkhouse ($600-$4,500 per weekend)

• Resort-size pool and a 50-foot water-slide

• 20,000 square foot covered arena for wiffleball, batting cages, and weddings

• Massage room, spa, and hot tub

• 24-hour fitness center

• Tennis and basketball courts

• 9-hole disc golf course

• 1-mile of private walking trails

• Private lake, fully stocked with catfish and bass

Revenue: For one team to play in a tournament here costs an average of $800. Split across 12 kids per team and that’s only $67 per family.

But Rocker B. sells out every tournament it hosts in minutes, and with 22 weeks of tournaments and 800 total teams, the facility likely makes over $640,000 per year in team fees alone.

Not to mention the $20 per car it costs to park and a full menu of custom food items on top of lodging, and it’s estimated that Rocker B makes over $20 million annually.

And when you consider that the average revenue of the top 20 minor league baseball teams is only $9.8 million, it’s hard to believe everything isn’t bigger in Texas.

⏱ In Other News

• The (Complicated) History of Harrison Butker

• The Milwaukee Brewers Hired a Hit-Woman (literally).

• The WNBA is +43% on Attendance YoY.

• The cost to propose at every MLB stadium.

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