You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
2 games
Chase Utley of the Los Angeles Dodgers was suspended for two games after a dirty slide broke the leg of New York Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada. Utley will appeal. [Associated Press]
4 percent
That’s Rand Paul’s support in a recent CBS News poll. It’s also just above the 3 percent needed to make it to the main stage of the next GOP primary debate on CNBC at the end of the month, rather than the J.V. debate, leaving Paul on the fence, along with Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee. [The Washington Post]
52 years
The Department of Agriculture is forecasting Florida’s orange crop will be the lowest it’s been in 52 years due to a citrus disease. This sounds, for all intents and purposes, like something that would happen in “Trading Places.” [Bloomberg]
68 percent
China has a massive public health crisis coming, with 68 percent of Chinese men — compared to 3.2 percent of women — smoking cigarettes. In the next decade, 1 in 5 male deaths in China will be smoking-related. [Quartz]
158 families
Donors from just 158 families have forked over $176 million to presidential hopefuls in the early phases of the campaign, about half the total haul so far. [The New York Times]
$3,891
Chicago is still in the hunt for a trip to the World Series, with a chance at its first title since 1908, when the Ottoman Empire was still around. As a result, prospective tickets for a home game in the series are wildly expensive: On the ticket sales site TiqIQ, the average asking price is $3,891. [Bloomberg]
$200,000
Amount South Carolina spends annually on dam maintenance and safety. After suffering catastrophic flooding, the notoriously stingy state infrastructure spending — highway maintenance is currently tethered to a gas tax that hasn’t gone up since 1987 — will have to rise to rebuild devastated thoroughfares. [U.S. News and World Report]
1.02 million
We have the first look at how Trevor Noah’s stint on “The Daily Show” is going: In the new host’s first week, the show averaged 1.02 million viewers, about two-thirds its audience at the same time last year. What’s weirdest about the show’s audience, though, is that it’s older: The median age of a viewer was 45.5 in Noah’s first week, a jump from 43.7 in Jon Stewart’s last. [Deadline]
$4.6 million
How much money the House committee on Benghazi has spent over the course of its investigation, which has increasingly targeted former Secretary of State and current Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. [The Washington Post]
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