My dad was born in the early ’20s. He would tell me that, as a kid, there were three big sports. There was boxing, horse racing and baseball.
Baseball was on the radio. There was a team in Brooklyn, there was a team in The Bronx, there was a team in Manhattan. And it was during the summer when kids are off. So it really became the lifeblood, and like the soap opera for a 9-year-old, 12-year-old kid at that time.
[My dad] comes back from the war, and baseball in New York goes through one of the great periods of time that any fan can possibly have. You have three teams that are all getting to the World Series each year, or facing each other each year, and that went on for 10 years or so, until the Dodgers left.
marc bryan-brown
We played Strat-O-Matic, All-Star Baseball, all the little games they had at the time. There was the Baseball Encyclopedia, which was pre-internet days obviously, it was a big, hardcover book. We just lived in it. Put your nose in it and you just kept going. The numbers just jumped out at you.
I spent a few years with Goldman, and transitioning out of Goldman, part of the Mets were for sale. I guess Nelson Doubleday was going to sell his half to Fred Wilpon. So I had called JPMorgan, and people put me in touch, and they said, “Well, the Mets trade has taken place already and Fred wasn’t really looking for partners, but we can show you another baseball team.”
I did love the Mets growing up. I either had the Baseball Encyclopedia or I was at Shea Stadium. I still can’t call it Citi Field. Sorry to the Citi guys.
As JPMorgan and the bankers there introduced me to Vince Naimoli and the then-CFO of the Devil Rays, Jeff White, I spent an hour looking at the numbers and hearing the story, it smelled like an amazing opportunity for a lot of reasons.
When I came in, I hired three people at the team, and everything flowed from that. They were three 27-year-old guys. None of them had any experience in baseball.
I knew finance, and I had a vision for how I wanted to see it go, and these guys worked their behinds off, and they’re brilliant, each of them brilliant, who understood the long-term view that we had in mind.
I can’t completely put my faith in the idea that if we just build a stadium, it’s gonna work. We’ve seen in Miami, at least to this point, it hasn’t, but they haven’t had the real success on the field, and now they have some new ownership, so there’s something to grab onto there as well.
Society has pushed us fortunately in [the] direction [of diversity], and we are ahead of the curve [in baseball].
This year, for the first time, we had three women traveling with the team. We have a blind baseball announcer on our Spanish broadcast. He’s the color guy, and it’s an amazing call of the game. Baseball is at the forefront of all of this.
Would I rather win 95 games and have low ratings and a million fans in the place, or win 70 games and have high ratings and 2.4 million people in the place? I’d probably go for the latter.
