MLB President of Business & Media BOB BOWMAN had been considering leaving the league for more than a year before officially announcing yesterday he is stepping down from his post at the end of the year. Though the shift has been formally discussed with MLB Commissioner ROB MANFRED over the past several weeks, Bowman said he began to consider it following Disney’s initial move to acquire a third of BAMTech last summer. Once Disney followed up that deal with a second transaction announced in August to acquire majority control of the MLBAM spinoff, his deliberations intensified. As Bowman this year relinquished his role running BAMTech’s day-to-day operations and fully returned to MLB business, he said he found the senior exec team reporting to him ready to assume more responsibility. “These folks are really smart and they are ready to run the company. The time is right,” Bowman said. MLB and MLBAM employees were notified of the move early yesterday, and Manfred spent part of yesterday at MLBAM’s headquarters at N.Y.’s Chelsea Market.
WHERE TO FROM HERE? The transition plan for MLBAM and MLB’s media operations has not yet been finalized, and Bowman said his current focus is to aid Manfred with an orderly shift. To that end, he said he has not determined any future career step, and declined to say what he might do next. “I’m focused on the transition,” he said. Bowman is concluding a 17-year run that catapulted MLB into a tech innovator and helped transform how sports fans consume digital content. He was hired in '00 by then-MLB Commissioner BUD SELIG from online retailer Outpost.com to oversee the newly formed MLBAM, where he would go on to lead the development of every major digital product and initiative for baseball. Some of those creations include the MLB.com At Bat and Ballpark mobile apps, the MLB.TV streaming video service and in-market streaming for 27 clubs, Statcast and BAMTech. At Bat in particular is the highest grossing sports app of all time, and the Disney-BAMTech deal generated more than $50M for each owner (Eric Fisher, Staff Writer).
A HUGE LEGACY: In N.Y., Kevin Draper notes MLBAM under Bowman's leadership became the "crown jewel" of MLB and the "envy of every sports league." It also was "one of the most important companies as the broadcast world transitioned to digital streaming." It generates "hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually." Bowman put MLBAM at the "bleeding edge of technology and transformed how fans consumed sports." The tech MLBAM created to "stream games simultaneously to hundreds of thousands of fans has underpinned some of the biggest internet streaming services," as ESPN, HBO, WWE, Fox Sports and Hulu all have hired the company "to run their back-end streaming operations" (N.Y. TIMES, 11/7). BASEBALL AMERICA's J.J. Cooper noted the development of MLBAM has been one of the "most significant baseball stories of the past two decades." Under Bowman, MLB "went from being a sport of regional sports networks with occasional cable and network national games to one where fans can now watch the majority of games each and every day on a wide variety of devices." Casual fans "may not even know" Bowman's name, but he would "rank near the top of ... a list of the most influential people in baseball of the 21st century" (BASEBALLAMERICA.com, 11/6). AWFUL ANNOUNCING's Andrew Bucholtz wrote there is a "good case to be made that baseball would be in a far weaker position in 2017 without the efforts" of Bowman and his team (AWFULANNOUNCING.com, 11/6).
