How Diamond Baseball Holdings Became The Most Powerful Owner Ever In Minor League Baseball — College Baseball, MLB Draft, Prospects

Image credit: Kevin Gowdy (16) and catcher Chris Okey (28) of the Oklahoma City Baseball Club celebrate a win after the final out of the game against the Sacramento River Cats on April 17, 2024 at Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. (John Williamson/Four Seam Images)

Fresno may be more than 2,000 miles from Nashville, but the California community is actually a country music hotbed. As much as that may be true, Fresno doesn’t always manage to convince Nashville of its bonafides.

For years, the Fresno Grizzlies have tried to bring top country acts to Chukchansi Park. For years, they have struck out. Whatever the reason, the Grizzlies couldn’t convince top-tier country acts to perform at their stadium.

Now, the Grizzlies have friends in high places.

Last November, the Grizzlies were sold to Diamond Baseball Holdings, becoming the 26th minor league team acquired by the company. And with that, Fresno’s trouble landing top country acts disappeared. This October, Thomas Rhett, a singer with 20 No. 1 songs on the Billboard Country Airplay charts, will play Chukchansi Park as part of DBH’s Music on the Diamond series.

Welcome to Fresno, DBH.

“People in Fresno ask: Where’s the country music? Now we have a show on the calendar,” Fresno Grizzlies general manager Derek Franks said. “We would have no chance to book Thomas Rhett if we tried to do that on our own.

“That answered something right off the bat. Our market was clamoring for it. The connections are a world of difference. Having a cold call from a random venue is a little different than getting a call from DBH who already has connections with these folks.”

In less than three years, Diamond Baseball Holdings has gone from an idea to the most powerful ownership group in the history of Minor League Baseball. DBH already has 33 teams either in its portfolio or going through the sales approval process. It has said it remains in acquisition mode. The group added 16 of those teams in 2023 and has already added four more in 2024.

Before MLB took over the operation of the minor leagues in 2020, no group was allowed to own more than one team in any league. That limited the scope of other multi-team owners like Mandalay Baseball Properties. Mandalay was considered a major force in Minor League Baseball because it owned seven teams at once.

The new restriction imposed by MLB is much less restrictive. DBH can own as many as 14 teams at any level of the minor leagues. That puts their upper limit at 56 teams—14 each at Triple-A, Double-A, High-A and Low-A—out of a possible 120 full-season minor league teams.

So what is Diamond Baseball Holdings? It’s a company that is part of the Silver Lake private equity group portfolio. Silver Lake itself is so large that it’s hard to fully list its portfolio. In the sports space, Silver Lake counts among its portfolio Fanatics, Madison Square Garden Sports and Learfield, the company that handles marketing, sales and media rights for a large number of college athletics programs.

It also has Endeavor, which owns multiple sports leagues, including UFC and PBR bull riding.

But because Endeavor also owns a sports agency, Diamond Baseball Holdings became a direct part of the Silver Lake portfolio.

The rapid growth of DBH led to many questions and some fears around the minor leagues about what the company led by Pat Battle and Peter Freund had in mind as it snapped up many of the flagship minor league franchises around the country.

Would they slash and burn front office staffs? Would minor league teams across the country lose their local flavor? Would DBH become too powerful, especially as it also has a contract with Major League Baseball to sell national MiLB advertising?

So far, many of those concerns have not materialized.

The general managers under DBH control were the same people running the clubs before DBH arrived. A fan who checks out 10 games a year might not even realize the team has been sold.

“Our conversations put me in a position to be able to tell all of our business partners and season-ticket holders: ‘We’re going to sell the team, but I’m not going anywhere.’” said Iowa Cubs president and general manager Sam Bernabe, who is in his 41st year working for the I-Cubs.

“The DBH philosophy is they want me to run the club the way I am running the club.”

Spartanburg GM Tyson Jeffers can attest. He previously ran the DBH-owned Hudson Valley Renegades. Now, he is getting ready to open a new park in Spartanburg, S.C., where the Down East franchise will relocate in 2025.

“They have been hyper-focused on ensuring the local staffs are staying in place,” Jeffers said.

DBH has been willing to move teams. The Mississippi Braves will move to Columbus, Ga., to a heavily-renovated stadium. Down East will head to Spartanburg. Those will entail leaving existing markets for ballparks that will meet MLB’s toughened facility requirements.

For the teams staying put, there have also been plenty of stadium changes. There have been new video boards, fresh coats of paint and various fan improvements. There have also been a lot of behind-the-scenes tweaks such as ticketing systems, financial system integrations, better financial reporting and improved fan surveys.

“I’m not saying DBH is just throwing money around, but if there are things the Iowa Cubs think they can generate more revenue, it’s a lot easier to talk about the possibility of getting those things done,” Bernabe said.

All of these systems do generate synergies that could boost profits. And DBH keeps hiring top-end talent to supervise its teams. But the part of the equation that many outside of DBH can’t figure out is the end game.

Private equity is looking for market-beating returns. And generally, private equity isn’t looking to buy and hold for the long term. It’s hard for many to figure out how that will work in Minor League Baseball. By multiple accounts, DBH is paying top-of-the-market rates for many of the teams it has purchased. That has done wonders for franchise values, and DBH’s willingness to pay those prices have convinced some of Minor League Baseball’s best and most successful owners to sell cornerstone franchises.

St. Paul, Oklahoma City, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Worcester and Albuquerque are all among the best operations in the minors. They are now all owned by DBH. So far, DBH clubs’ announced attendances have remained in line with those of non-DBH teams.

DBH says it isn’t looking to get in and out of the minors quickly. Instead, they want it to be a long-term success.

“We believe we are in the first inning and just getting started,” Freund said. “We will continue to acquire clubs and work to implement best practices across our entire platform for many years to come. We have not and are not contemplating a sale of DBH, but rather to build a long-term, sustainable business where everyone eats, sleeps and drinks Minor League Baseball.”

Over the next few years, DBH-owned teams will be working to make sure their ballparks are busy far beyond the 60-70 home dates each team has during the baseball season.

“We’re in the business to make more money. DBH looks at the owning of a team in Iowa as a 365-day opportunity,” Bernabe said. “It takes really smart people to do those things. I think you will see some great things come in non-baseball events.”

Every minor league team in the country is trying to add events outside of the baseball schedule. But the Music at the Diamond series is an example of how DBH has connections and relationships that make those events more feasible.

It also has the numbers and funding to take chances an individually-owned team might not feel comfortable taking. Promoting non-baseball events requires taking the risk that the event might not meet expectations, especially if weather interferes at an outdoor venue.

“When you scale, you have the ability to look across 30-plus teams and start to build out a program of non-baseball events,” Jeffers said. “It’s a little bit easier on an individual basis to accept some of the risk that happens.

“We’re an outdoor facility. There’s always the risk of weather. When there’s an individual ownership group, that might be a reason to not execute that event.”

As someone with more than 40 years in the minors, Bernabe knows pretty much everyone around the game. His phone has rung regularly over the past few years with friends wondering what life’s like with DBH.

“I get a lot of calls from a lot of people asking how’s it going for that very reason—whether they have been approached by DBH or just curious,” he said. “A lot of my friends call. I tell them, ‘If the phone rings, and DBH is on the other side of it, you better pick it up.’ A lot of good comes from this.”