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The Arkansas Travelers on Thursday announced that its board of directors had approved the sale of the team to Diamond Baseball Holdings, an organization that has purchased more than 30 Minor League Baseball teams since it was founded three years ago.
Financial terms of the transaction, which is still subject to approval from team shareholders and Major League Baseball, were not disclosed. The deal is expected to close “in the near future,” the Travelers said in a news release.
The team was founded in 1901 and has been owned by Arkansas Travelers Baseball Inc. since 1960, when Ray Winder led a public stock drive to purchase the New Orleans franchise for a move to Little Rock.
The team’s new owners have vowed to keep the Travelers as a locally-operated Double-A affiliate of the Seattle Mariners and retain all current front office staff, including CEO Rusty Meeks.
Meeks’ father, Russ, is president of Arkansas Travelers Baseball Inc. In a statement, he said that Diamond Baseball Holdings “has a reputation for celebrating the local identity of their clubs while supercharging the impact on the local community, and we’re eager to see the Travelers benefit from their leadership and expertise.” The organization is known for integrating cutting-edge digital technologies into club operations and providing “new value-generating opportunities” in partnership with MLB.
Baseball America called Diamond Baseball Holdings “the most powerful ownership group in the history of Minor League Baseball.” The company is part of the Silver Lake private equity group portfolio, which includes Fanatics, Madison Square Garden Sports and Learfield, the company that handles marketing, sales and media rights for a large number of college athletics programs.
Diamond Baseball Holdings is led by Executive Chairman Pat Battle and CEO Peter Freund.
“We are honored to have the opportunity to be entrusted with a legacy as longstanding as the Travelers’, and we’re grateful to Russ, the Mariners and the cities of Little Rock and North Little Rock for their support of this partnership,” Battle and Freund said in a statement. “We look forward to enhancing the experience at Dickey-Stephens Park that fans already know and love, with Rusty and the entire front office staff at the helm, and deepening our connection with the greater Central Arkansas community.”
Diamond Baseball Holdings was formed in 2021, a year after MLB took over the minor leagues and changed rules that had prohibited organizations from owning more than one team at each level of the minors.
The company’s rapid pace of acquisitions — which have reportedly come at premium prices — has raised questions about its goals in the industry and the influence it has gained.
In April, Battle told The Athletic that Diamond Baseball Holdings was still “aggressively in acquisition mode.”
“We are agnostic to geography. We are agnostic to club affiliation. If you’re one of the 120,” he said, referring to the number of teams in the minor leagues, “we are interested.”
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