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Private equity is the steamroller that crushes all your favorite things. Journalism, for one, and also a once iconic toy store; even bowling these days. Now it has come for minor league baseball, where in little more than three years one private equity firm has managed to buy up a healthy percentage of the MiLB teams in the United States. 

Diamond Baseball Holdings, a company backed by the private equity firm Silver Lake, has acquired 45 Minor League Baseball teams since its creation in late 2021. They own teams from coast to coast, in cities big and small. This means one company now owns more than 35 percent of all minor league baseball teams. And it shows no sign of slowing down. 

They didn’t even pause for MLB’s winter meetings last year, when all 30 teams and league representatives met and conducted business, including announcing free-agent signings and potential changes in the league. While the meetings went on, DBH announced purchases of five new teams: the Syracuse Mets (Triple-A Mets), the Brooklyn Cyclones (High-A Mets), the Modesto Nuts (Low-A Mariners), the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes (Low-A Dodgers), and the Tri-City Dust Devils (High-A Angels). The day those purchases were announced, DBH released a statement announcing the relocation of the Modesto Nuts to San Bernardino, where the Inland Empire 66ers (Low-A Angels) currently play, triggering what amounted to affiliate musical chairs.

When the music stopped, three California League franchises had relocated: Inland Empire would become the Mariners’ affiliate with Modesto’s move, Inland Empire’s move to Rancho Cucamonga meant that they became the Angels’ affiliate, and Rancho Cucamonga became a new team entirely, in Ontario—a Dodgers’ affiliate, and one that will be playing at a new $100 million sports complex. 

How did a sports scene like minor league baseball—backed by a more than 100-year history of silly local mascots, intimate hometown stadiums, local ownership, and famously the most affordable and family friendly baseball experience around—get devoured so quickly by private equity? The answer, as it tends to, lies in the paperwork. Specifically, it goes back to when MLB made changes in early 2021 to the Player Development License (PDL), which is essentially the contract of terms between a MLB team and its minor league affiliate. Before 2021, an ownership group could only own one team in a local minor league baseball circuit. The new PDL got rid of that rule and replaced it with a limit of 50 total, and no more than 14 at one level.

The collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the players union expires next year, which will open up a window that allows MLB to cut minor league teams for any reason; MLB has been signaling its intention to do so for some time, even after eliminating dozens of minor league franchises in 2020.

At a recent congressional hearing of Small Business Committee called “Beyond the Ballpark: The Role of Minor Leagues in Economic Growth,” Congressman Morgan McGarvey (D-KY) asked the panel of witnesses, which included DBH executive chairman Pat Battle, “One thing that makes me worried is, what happens when baseball goes away? A few years ago, contraction significantly reduced the number of affiliated minor league teams all the way to 120.” McGarvey directed the question to Joe Chamberlain, CEO and managing partner of the West Michigan Whitecaps and the Traverse City Pit Spitters. Chamberlain said he did not necessarily have an answer.

The next day, the MLB Players Association released a statement that pointed out “Major League Baseball’s contraction of 42 Minor League teams in 2020 devastated baseball fans—a move that was aided and abetted by MLB’s court-granted exemption from antitrust laws.” A source with MLB knowledge said that the league has no plans to contract more teams once the restriction on further reducing minor league teams in the MLBPA CBA expires on Dec. 1, 2026, also citing that the PDL agreements run until 2030.

Defector Media reached out to both MLB and DBH for comment. In response, an MLB spokesman gave the following statement: “Since 2021, Minor League Clubs have received PDL licenses from MLB that entitle them to operate in the Professional Development Leagues, ensuring a new set of standards in terms of facilities and player working conditions. The licenses and new system have created many improvements to the experience and lifestyle of Minor League players, such as player salary increases; modernized facility standards better suited for professional athletes; better amenities and working conditions for players and staff; reduced in-season travel for players and coaches; and stronger geographical alignment. Diamond Baseball Holdings is treated the same as every other PDL Club owner.”

DBH gave the following statement: “DBH is committed to high standards of integrity and excellence, which are core to everything we do to cultivate and support the unique local energy and family-friendly, affordable entertainment that Minor League Baseball clubs bring to communities around the country.”

So far, general managers and former minor league team owners have largely sung DBH’s praises in the press. But about a dozen former and current employees of DBH clubs who spoke to Defector, almost all requesting anonymity for fear of retaliation in the small world of professional baseball, said that they felt DBH was an employer less focused on America’s pastime and more on how to regionalize operations and turn stadiums into entertainment complexes. Think Wrigleyville, but in Fresno. Or just think private equity.

The sudden spread of DBH from New York City to the Mississippi to the Pacific can be traced back to something MLB leadership dubbed “One Baseball.”

In 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, MLB announced “One Baseball” as a way to vertically integrate the minors. The plan, Baseball America reported, was for MLB to become the ultimate decision-maker on baseball and softball throughout the United States. Under that plan, MLB then went about restructuring the minors, resulting in more than 40 teams and scores of baseball jobs being eliminated. Those lost positions ensured that, even after long-overdue improvements in minor league salaries and accommodations, the player-development process remained something like revenue neutral for big-league franchises.

This is also when changes to the PDL, allowing any ownership group to gobble up many more franchises, went into effect. 

A year after One Baseball began, sports executive Pat Battle would tell the Sports Business Journal that he read a story in 2020 about the backlash to One Baseball and decided to pitch MLB on his idea that the best fix for minor league baseball was scale. No more mom-and-pop stuff, it was time to run the private equity playbook. Battle told deputy MLB commissioner Dan Halem about the idea, then connected Halem with Peter Freund, who already worked for MLB as a consultant regarding the Minor League Baseball transition. At the time, Freund owned three minor league teams—the Memphis Redbirds, Charleston RiverDogs, and Willamsport Crosscutters—and also was a partner with the New York Yankees. (A source with knowledge of the restructuring said that Freund was not involved in the removal of the PDL club purchasing limit.)

Memphis is now owned by DBH, while Charleston’s ownership group is the Goldklang Group, which still includes Freund, per the team’s own website. The Williamsport Crosscutters were one of the minor league teams eliminated in the restructuring, though their ownership group page still lists Freund as the principal owner as part of a group called Cutting Edge Baseball LLC, a division of Trinity Sports Holdings.

As part of One Baseball, MLB announced a new facility standard for minor league teams, that required all sorts of upgrades of minor league ballparks. A lot of these requirements make sense and were long overdue—improvements like better field lighting, kitchen space, and having spaces for women on staff. A source with knowledge of the restructuring and facility standards said that this was done to modernize player development.

But it also caused a lot of problems for some teams, especially those in smaller cities that would be more hesitant to throw public money toward a stadium. It’s why the Eugene Emeralds (High-A Giants) are on the hunt for a new home. The Hillsboro Hops (High-A Diamondbacks) have a new ballpark on the horizon, built with public dollars. The Richmond Flying Squirrels (Double-A Giants) have a new park, too, with the help of about $130 million in public bonds.

These standards went into place late in 2020. By December of 2021, The Mississippi Braves were announced as part of DBH, along with nine other teams that were announced the same day.

A welcome/onboarding deck dated that same month and provided to DBH affiliate employees, which was obtained by Defector, showed Battle and Freund as “key spokespeople,” along with Endeavor president Mark Shapiro. “Additional spokespeople” listed on the deck included MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, MLB deputy commissioner Dan Halem, MLB CRO Noah Garden, and MLB team presidents and owners Tom Ricketts, Terry McGuirk, and Bill DeWitt. McGuirk is chairman and CEO of Braves Holdings LLC, which owns the Atlanta Braves and previously owned the Mississippi Braves before it was sold to DBH. 

An MLB official said that the league had nothing to do with the creation of this slide deck. Ricketts’s PR team said he is not involved in DBH and noted that he is not associated with the New York Yankees, which is inexplicably listed as an affiliation in the DBH welcome/onboarding deck in addition to the Chicago Cubs. This slide deck also lists McGuirk as being part of the Dodgers, which is not a team McGuirk has been affiliated with. According to sources with four different DBH teams, the current onboarding documents do not list Manfred or Halem. 

DBH did not answer Defector’s question about what “spokesperson” refers to, either, or why these executives and owners were included at all.

Shortly after DBH announced its acquisition of those 10 teams, The Athletic reported in January of 2022 that the MLB players union took issue with DBH because it had been owned by Endeavor, which has a portfolio that also includes WME Sports, which employs agents who represent baseball players. The union believed that this created a conflict of interest for those agents. The union, Ballpark Digest wrote at the time, “didn’t look kindly on a deal where WME, via Endeavor, owned teams and also represented players.” Months later, Endeavor sold DBH to Silver Lake, seemingly resolving the purported conflict. 

In 2024, however, Silver Lake bought out Endeavor outright. (Silver Lake is also an investor in Fanatics.) A Sports Business Journal article about Silver Lake’s take-private of Endeavor noted that the conflict of interest with ownership of both DBH and WME Baseball was once again being reviewed by the MLBPA; WME reportedly looked into selling its baseball agency because of said conflict of interest. The MLBPA declined to comment about the sale. A few months earlier, SBJ published a rather glowing feature on DBH, which mentioned that a deputy MLB commissioner was the one who connected Battle with Freund. 

After only purchasing three teams in 2022, DBH ramped up the acquisitions with 16 teams added to its portfolio in 2023, including the Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes and Worcester Red Sox. By the end of 2024, they had acquired 12 more, including those three California League teams in Modesto, Rancho Cucamonga, and Inland Empire; that gave them the majority of the franchises in that league.

As DBH swept through the minors, acquiring team after team, rumors swept through the small community of minor league baseball workers. Who were these people? And why would private equity be interested in minor league baseball? 

Work environments in the minors have never been ideal, for players or those in the front office. The work means long hours and, often, very little pay. Nights and weekends are gone during the season and work/life balance is a struggle. It’s a job that requires dedication, and which guarantees no payoff. 

Yet there is a stark difference between working for an average Minor League Baseball operation and working under Diamond Baseball Holdings, as former and current employees described it to Defector. Of the approximately dozen current and former DBH employees I spoke to across five teams, some noted a distinct lack of transparency from ownership; many employees said they do not know what the group’s end goal is, and that was something that worried them. Almost none of them would speak on the record, for fear of retaliation in the small world of professional baseball. 

And with no clear goals, nearly all the former employees said they couldn’t help but speculate. Many were worried about minor league teams being cut, and that DBH’s vacuuming up of teams was part of that future reduction. Given how eager MLB has been to downsize the minors in the past, some employees I spoke to wondered if DBH was working with the league to help bring about more cuts. “I think DBH is a front for MLB,” one employee told me. And it’s not just employees who are confused. Speaking to The Nation for a story earlier this year about private equity buying up minor league baseball teams, longtime minor league baseball owner Miles Wolff asked the publication, “Do you understand how Diamond Baseball hopes to make money? I’m mystified.”

When asked to address the comment that DBH is a front for MLB, an MLB official said this is “categorically false.”

One recurring theme that employees at multiple DBH teams brought up was that, once DBH came to town, they felt a stronger push to grow non-baseball live events at ballparks. That makes some business sense: Ticketed events at ballparks on days when the team is on the road or in the offseason would bring in more money. Some DBH employees noted that new ownership was more focused on the venue than the baseball team. One employee noted having more offseason and off-day events to maximize use of the ballpark for more than just baseball games. 

Such a focus that would be familiar to anyone familiar with the Cubs’ team-driven development projects around Wrigleyville, for instance, in which a broader real estate gambit has taken precedence over the baseball team at its center. Abraham Madkour of SBJ said as much on Nov. 18: “Make no mistake, this is a long-term real estate play, and Diamond Baseball has broad ambitions of developing mixed-use districts around the ballparks in which it plays, where it is the biggest event in town, and can aggregate audiences to create energy and commerce around the ballparks, becoming a strong economic driver in its communities.”

The Wrigleyville-ization of Minor League Baseball could very well be part of the One Baseball strategy. This might look like implementing something like Mission Rock, a mixed-use waterfront neighborhood near Oracle Park in San Francisco that capitalized on the real estate of what used to be stadium parking, in places like Charlotte or Fresno.

DBH announced in 2024 its “Music on the Diamond” series, which it described as “a first of-its-kind offering” of concerts at the ballpark, promoted by William Morris Endeavor (WME) and Doussan Music Group (DMG), with some artists lined up being managed by these groups. The concerts were also sponsored by T-Mobile, a major sponsor of MLB. Following the announcement of DBH’s purchase of the Syracuse Mets, Freund appeared on NewsChannel 9 WSYR to talk about the plans for the team. For the most part, those plans have deployed the boilerplate language used to describe the goals of DBH, including the plans to add more entertainment at the ballpark. Freund also talked about scale. 

“Where we bring scale and we bring opportunity—as you can imagine when you’re as large as we are—is we can bring technology to the ballpark, we can bring other events to the ballpark,” Freund told WSYR. “We ran a Music on the Diamond tour across our ballparks this summer with Miranda Lambert. We look to do things like that in Syracuse where we can activate the ballpark beyond just the 70 home games a year, and that’s something that DBH can bring to the community as we enter it.”

During the congressional hearing on the role of the minor leagues in economic growth, DBH execs were asked how the development of an entertainment complex around the Louisville Bats’ stadium would help the city.

“When we announced the acquisition of the Louisville Bats probably about 18 months ago, Mayor [Craig] Greenberg pulled us aside at the press conference—in fact he pulled Henry Shepherd [DBH Head of M&A], who Chairman [Brian] Jack mentioned earlier, aside and said ‘We’ve been waiting on DBH to acquire the team. The city owns eight acres of land adjacent to the stadium and we would like to sit down as quickly as possible and figure out how we can partner to help continue to revitalize that part of Louisville,'” Battle said at the hearing. “We have partnered very closely with the Louisville Metro Government. […] We’ve talked about a $250 million investment in building condominium, hotel, entertainment district. All of the things that we think will continue to energize that part of Louisville.”

Another part of that scale appears to be the creation of regional, not local, jobs. With the Modesto Nuts moving to San Bernardino and the affiliate shuffling, DBH has posted new jobs based at the new Ontario club with “regional director” titles, such as “regional director of corporate partnerships” and “regional director of retail merchandise.”

In slides obtained by Defector, a presentation at Winter Meetings stated that in 2025, the Central PDL (Minor League Baseball) is expected to be profitable “for the first time ever.” That revenue growth includes “contractual escalator in DBH agency agreements,” but also Bally’s media rights and online ticketing. One week into the Triple-A season, and the day before the season began for the rest of the minors, Minor League Baseball announced a partnership with Circle K, calling them the official convenience store of MiLB. In the photo attached to the press release sent to reporters, a MiLB spokesperson listed Michelle Linkletter White, director of partnership marketing at Diamond Baseball Holdings, as someone present in the photo. There is no mention of DBH otherwise.

“It is known across Minor League Baseball that DBH also has a role on the industry’s sponsorship sales side, which helps all teams across MiLB,” an MLB spokesman told Defector.

A source with knowledge of the situation said that the league and all PDL club owners were aware of the arrangement and the deal was reviewed by independent committees, also adding that there are safeguards in place to prevent conflicts of interest.

An additional slide at the Central PDL Executive Board meeting said that long term contractual revenue included “$224M total guaranteed revenue from DBH Agency Agreements in 2026-2030.” This slide also referenced “key uncertainties,” including the Minor League wing of the MLBPA, the MLB Umpires Association CBA expiring after the 2025 season, the media landscape past contract expiration, and Diamond Baseball Holdings. They are also expecting that PDL clubs are projected to earn a three-year total of approximately $11.6M of profit sharing through 2027 with clubs averaging $17,976 in profit shares for 2025 and growing to an average of $44,274 in 2027.

“The drastic increase in the valuation of affiliated Minor League franchises underscores what players and fans alike have always known: that Minor League baseball is an unquestionably lucrative business, and the foundation of that business is the players on the field,” an MLBPA spokesman told Defector.

Minor league teams play a vital cultural role in small cities and rural areas, and fill a void for baseball fans that don’t have easy access to a major league team. These games are less expensive to attend, and the ballpark experience is generally more geared toward families. Teenagers work their first summer jobs at the ballpark; communities are built in the stands, between booster clubs and season ticket holders that gather at home games and follow the team on the road. The community gets to know the team, and the team gives back in return by getting involved in the community. It’s a business, but not the kind of optimized and hyper-efficient kind that private equity seeks to create. It’s something more like a public trust.

Or at least, that’s how it was, and how certain minor league outposts continue to be. But how much longer that can go on remains to be seen. Private equity and vertical integration have overtaken so many other U.S. institutions. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before it came for baseball, too.

How many teams can DBH own? Right now, the limit is 50. But that could change with the next collective bargaining agreement, or DBH could look into new areas of local sports that it sees as potential targets for some more scale and consolidation. Sportico reported in January that DBH was looking into possibly buying lower division soccer clubs in the United States. That’s another thing about private equity—it’s persistent.

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