Major League Baseball views its pending consolidation at a new New York headquarters as a continuation of the One Baseball strategy first outlined last year by Commissioner Rob Manfred.
The league earlier this month signed a lease to occupy 400,000 square feet on six floors in the Time-Life Building in midtown Manhattan, with a plan to assume the space in 2018 and move in the following year. The deal will shift the league’s primary headquarters from 245 Park Ave. in New York, where it has been since 1999, and MLB Advanced Media will vacate its space in the Chelsea Market, where it has been since its 2000-01 formation.
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Both MLB and MLBAM plan to move to midtown Manhattan's Time-Life Building in 2019.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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Since becoming commissioner in January 2015, Manfred has sought to not only unify baseball’s business operations but also align MLB more deeply with lower levels of the sport. In his mind, that couldn’t be achieved without bringing together most of the league’s staff in a single location.
“It’s a significant step,” Manfred said, “one I think is going to be good for both the league and [MLBAM], and something that allows us to be more present with each other, and with the public.”
MLB Network’s studios in Secaucus, N.J., which also now house NHL Network as part of the media partnership struck last year between MLB and the NHL, will remain active.
MLBAM’s continuing growth also drove the decision to move and consolidate offices. Housed in part of a former Nabisco factory, MLBAM’s Chelsea Market location has become more cramped in recent years, now also housing baseball’s instant replay operations and the surging BAM Tech spinoff.
“We were running out of space and getting to a level of density that was unfair to our employees,” said Bob Bowman, MLB president of business and media. “Chelsea Market worked well as a place to launch a business. But a lot of technical things there were tough, and we’re essentially getting a new building that will be gutted window to window.”
The Time-Life Building is being renamed to its address, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, and its owner, the Rockefeller Group, is pursuing a $600 million renovation. Once MLB moves in, it will gain a retail presence, use of the street-level plaza for public events, and access to an eighth-floor outdoor terrace.
Terms of the new lease, or other cost involved in the moves, were not disclosed.
MLBAM’s move uptown will represent a cultural shift for baseball’s digital arm, which played a sizable role in establishing New York and its more immediate Chelsea neighborhood as technology hotbeds. Bowman said he wasn’t concerned that moving to a more conservative Midtown locale would cause employee recruitment or retention issues.
“It’s still New York, and New York is still a very desirable place for people to work,” Bowman said. “And we think we can change the neighborhood.”
The former Time-Life Building was built in 1959 for Henry Luce’s publishing empire, but Time Inc. vacated its namesake home early last year for a new location in lower Manhattan. The building was also the fictional home of Sterling Cooper & Partners in TV’s “Mad Men.”
