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Businessperson's Special
By Alan Schwarz
Wharton alumni lead professional baseball teams — in the front office, the owner’s box, and even on the field.
Wharton alumni lead professional baseball teams—in
the front office, the owner's box, and even on the field.
In ballparks throughout the United States this summer, fans will
celebrate the seventh-inning stretch with
one more hot dog, yet another beer, and a rousing chorus of "Take Me
Out to the Ballgame." They'll toast
to their good fortune and soak in the panorama, whisked back to their
youths in a delightful, dreamy
daze. They'll come to just as Shoeless Joe emerges from the cornfield in
right. But for about a dozen
Wharton alumni at these games, their stadium experience will be considerably
different. They will enjoy
none of these Rockwellian delights. They will be working. They will be in
the owner's box, surveying the
attendance figures and sweating next year's payroll. They will be pointing a
radar gun at the fastball of
next year's high school phenom. They will be in the boardroom devising new
wireless services for fans
that will make Dick Tracy look downright Victorian. They will be brainstorming
tomorrow's minor-league
Vasectomy Night promotion. (More on that later.) They will be playing second
base, of all things.
For these Wharton
alumni, baseball isn't a break
from work—it is their work. So
what if they don't make anywhere near
the money they might on Wall Street's treadmill,
at plush-leather consulting firms, and other
traditional b-school careers? And who cares if working
in baseball forfeits one's ability to blow off the office and go
to the ballpark, since the ballpark is the office? Talk to any
Wharton alumnus working in the national pastime, and
you'll find that the most difficult thing about calling baseball
your job is not being able to call it anything worse.
"It's virtually impossible to complain about this job," said
Bob Bowman, WG'79, the president and CEO of Major
League Baseball Advanced Media, MLB's flourishing Internet
arm. "Because when people like doctors and lawyers and bankers
are complaining about their jobs, and then you mention you
work in baseball and there are not a lot of sympathetic ears." Or
as Jon Searles, W'05, a pitcher in the Boston Red Sox minor
league system, put it: "I have friends who are making six figures
at Lehman and Citigroup, and they all say, 'This'll be here when
you retire. I'd do anything to be where you are.'"
Between Bowman, one of the most powerful people in all
of sports, and Searles, an all-but-anonymous farmhand, lives
a full roster of Wharton alumni making names for themselves
in the baseball world. There's Bob Castellini, WG'67,
a native Cincinnatian who recently became principal owner
of his hometown Cincinnati Reds, joining longtime Phillies
CEO Dave Montgomery, WG'70, at exclusive ownership
meetings and invitation-only events like Wharton's May
2006 Impact Conference: Building Winning and Profitable
Organizations in Professional Team Sports. Cardinals executive
Jeff Luhnow, M&T'89, is part of the Ivy League
revolution among team front offices. Mark DeRosa, W'97,
is where Searles wants to be—in the major leagues, playing
well for the Texas Rangers. Marvin Goldklang, W'63,
is one of the most prominent owners in all of the minor
leagues, his clubs setting the gold standard for both profitable
business sense and headline-worthy hijinks.
All of these men have become so successful in an industry
often overlooked by Wharton grads that the next generation
has started to take notice: Both the Wharton Sports Business
Initiative, a research and industry arm led by longtime professor
Kenneth Shropshire, and the new Wharton Sports
Business Club (WSBC) are indoctrinating new students
about how fertile major league grass can be. "The sports
industry as a whole is not hiring a lot of MBAs, but I think
they're starting to, and that trend is moving in a positive
direction," said Anne Boviard, WG'07, co-president of the
WSBC. "People who are involved in major sports companies
who now have moved up in the ranks and have their MBAs
are looking to their alma maters to hire people coming out.
That's not something that's traditionally done in the sports
industry in the same way that it's done by investment banks
or consulting firms or consumer products companies."
Perhaps. But if there's anything these Wharton grads are
doing just like their breathren at those banks and firms, it's
succeeding. Wildly.
To anyone familiar
with the baseball biz,
Bowman's work with MLB
Advanced Media is the industry's most
intriguing, and potentially profitable, venture
since Mr. and Mrs. Ruth decided to have a Babe.
Just 10 years ago, only a few baseball owners—if any—had
ever heard of the Internet. Now, this cash cow might
just save their bacon.
BAM, as it's known among baseballites, oversees MLB's
online business on its portal (mlb.com) and elsewhere, from
ticketing and merchandise to Web broadcasts and wireless
services. It has exploded from a 2000 startup with $120
million in seed money to a profitable company with $195
million in annual revenues and growing at some 30 to 40
percent a year. Some experts say that if it were to go public—a
temptation baseball owners have thus far resisted—it
could be worth $2 billion and go a long way toward fixing
the game's problems with revenue imbalance among clubs.
Said MLB commissioner Bud Selig, "I don't think a lot of
people understood how important this is going to be."
Leading the company is Bowman, a 51-year-old Michigan
native who arrived with the all-but-motto, "It's the content,
stupid." While he has leveraged his company's position in
the ticketing and merchandising areas—as well as building
such a mammoth broadband pipeline that BAM now
hosts sites for top music acts and even the NCAA basketball
tournament's streaming video—Bowman has always clung
to the fact that baseball, because it plays 2,430 games a year,
had vastly more material to exploit than any other sport.
(Football, by comparison, plays only two days a week with
every game part of a national television contract.) Bowman's
enterprise first tackled radio, began webcasting every game in
full this season—in perfectly watchable video clarity—and
now is tackling an array of wireless services that will keep
fans connected to the game as tightly as the 108 stitches on
baseballs themselves.
"We're at an inflection point," said Bowman, who speaks
about as fast as you'd expect from someone for whom Diet Coke
is a major food group.
"The question is, will
people watch 40 minutes
on a 1.5-inch screen? I
don't know. Certainly we're
preparing for it, and certainly
in terms of ubiquity
and the ability to reach
customers, we're doing everything
we can. We're preparing
for everything. And
it's going to be a real maelstrom
in terms of trying to
get on cellphone devices
and wireless devices. I can't
predict where we're going
to go, and if you can't predict,
you've just got to plan
a little bit more."
Much will depend on how the marketplace reacts to
paying for baseball's type of premium content. More than
800,000 people in 2005 subscribed to some sort of streaming
audio or video package, that number probably rising
another 50 percent this year. ("And as we move over to
cellphones," Bowman said, "people are more used to paying
for services on that kind of device than they've been on the
Internet.") The result could become so many tens and hundreds
of millions, all of which is shared among baseball's 30
owners, that some believe MLBAM could help fill the financial
gulf between the game's opulent New York Yankees and
penurious Kansas City Royals. Whispers among baseball's
power brokers suggest that Bowman has become as powerful
as anyone at Major League Baseball not named Selig.
"I don't know if they're taking me more seriously or the
business," Bowman quipped about ownership, "but they're
certainly taking this business more seriously."
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