Website Profile: From Major to Minor - March 2005  

In the latest sports website profile, S&T talks to Bob Bowman, president and CEO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM) about the company’s recent partnership with Minor League Baseball and its online plans.

MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM), the interactive media and internet company of Major League Baseball, and the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (NAPBL), better known as Minor League Baseball, signed an historic, wide-ranging 10-year online partnership agreement in January 2005, making MLBAM the exclusive provider of internet-related services and other interactive media services to NAPBL. 
The online agreement makes MLBAM exclusively responsible for the development, operation and maintenance of the official NAPBL website, the websites for each of the NAPBL leagues and the websites for the NAPBL teams that elect to participate in the new website network. In addition, MLBAM has been selected as the official statistician for Minor League Baseball.
The agreement will begin with the start of the 2005 season and will extend through until 2014. NAPBL currently governs 17 leagues and about 200 individual teams.
As part of the agreement MLBAM will handle the online sale of merchandise, including tickets, content, advertising and sponsorships and statistical syndication for the Minor League network. MLBAM will have the exclusive online use of NAPBL, league and team trademarks, names, logos, mascots, player names, likenesses, photos and game audio and video.
“This is a huge deal for us,” says Bowman, commenting on the partnership, “and indicative of a new spirit of cooperation between the Major League and the Minor Leagues of baseball. It’s a huge jump for us to come from managing the websites of 30 MLB teams, plus MLB.com, to now looking after the majority of the Minor League sites as well. We’re back to a vertical expansion.”

Migrating the sites

MLBAM plans to migrate around 60 of the existing minor league sites before the new baseball season starts in April (CHECK). “We’ll be carrying out a site by site upgrade, but the work will be unknown to the end-user to keep the transition seamless. The sites will look different to the MLB ones as they will be more localised and personalised. But there will also be some similarities between Minor League sites, so that fans can easily navigate the sites of the rival teams they are playing.”
In terms of how MLBAM will monetise the minor league sites, Bowman is bullish about paid content and ticketing. “At the moment, Minor League baseball only has around 60% occupancy at games, so there’s a lot of upside in ticket selling on the web. It’s more convenient for fans to choose seats online and easier and faster too. You get that instant gratification from viewing and selecting the best seat.”
A new innovation for the minor league sites will be pitch-by-pitch textual commentary of games. “This has never been done for the Minor League before,” says Bowman. “Every game will have a textual description as well as graphic of the field.”

MLBAM’s expansion

MLBAM has already expanded over the last year due to its running of the Major League Soccer network, but is gearing up to cope with the demands of the new Minor League Baseball deal. “We’re hiring 40 new people,” explains Bowman, “many of whom will be based regionally. The pulse will be here in New York at our headquarters, but the arms and legs will be in the rest of the country.”
Bowman is keen to increase the global popularity of baseball in general and sees MLBAM’s partnership with Minor League Baseball as helping to achieve that. “There are five Taiwanese players in the Minor League for example and we will be able to draw on that in order to grow popularity of our sport outside the US,” he says. “We need to start building up more baseball academies overseas. We have been playing in Latin America for generations and we need to start doing that all over the world.”
Sticking with the wider picture, Bowman sees MLBAM’s remit as distributing baseball content to fans whenever and wherever they need it. “We are not going to tell fans where or when to watch,” he explains. “Our responsibility is for us to deliver baseball whenever it is wanted and on whatever device. We need to be in a position to do that on an archive basis and also in realtime. Our sport is very data rich – every time an arms moves for example, some sort of data is created.”
With MLBAM reportedly garnering revenues of over $120m in 2004, and now having around 4m visitors today to its websites during the regular season, one cannot help but expect the Minor Leagues to benefit from the company’s expertise.

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