Article in The Athletic about Diamond Baseball and their buying spree:
https://theathletic.com/5408834/2024/04/15/minor-league-baseball-team-ownership-diamond-baseball-holdings/?source=user_shared_article. “A new group is buying up minor league baseball teams at a feverish pace. What’s the end game?”
At the center of this transformation is Diamond Baseball Holdings, a three-year-old company that owns more than a quarter of all minor league clubs. From a ground-up franchise in Spartanburg, S.C., to long-established clubs in Louisville, Ky., and Lansing, Mich., to their most recent purchase of the Harrisburg Senators in Pennsylvania, Diamond Baseball Holdings (DBH) now owns 32 of 120 affiliates, and its founders said they are still “aggressively in acquisition mode.”
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The DBH portfolio has grown at a rate, and to a size, that would have been impossible five years ago. It is a byproduct of Major League Baseball’s 2020 takeover of the minor leagues, which yanked affiliated baseball out of more than 40 communities and shifted minor league control to the MLB office.
Commissioner Rob Manfred’s “One Baseball” initiative seeks to put every aspect of the game under one umbrella — that of the major league team owners — from Yankee Stadium to the Little League World Series, and all things in between.
In the middle of that plan is DBH, co-founded by former college sports licensing executive Battle and longtime minor league owner Peter Freund, and financially backed by private equity investment firm Silver Lake.
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Beyond its ownership role, DBH has a strategic partnership with MLB to help negotiate national sponsorships and branding opportunities on behalf of all minor league franchises, and it also plays a role in consumer product licensing for all 120 teams.
So it seems that Manfred’s fingerprints are all over this, to the point where the article states that MLB actually introduced the two co-founders of D H when each had separately expressed interest in ownership consolidation of MiLB teams.
I’m still not sure what the end game is for Manfred except more control. And what is the end goal of Silver Lake, the PE firm financing all this? I’m still uneasy.
