Mark Attanasio has already followed in Bud Selig’s footsteps once.
He has no plans to do it again.
The Milwaukee Brewers’ owner was as surprised as anyone when Bob Nightengale of USA Today named Attanasio as a potential candidate to replace Rob Manfred as Commissioner of Major League Baseball when Manfred retires in four years.
According to Nightengale, “several owners say that plan to push” for Attanasio to take the job but it’s one Attanasio insists he’s not interested in accepting.
“I got a number of people who sent me that tweet from Bob Nightengale, and I was tempted to call Bob and say, ‘Well, who’s telling you this?’” Attanasio said Monday before the Brewers opened the home portion of their 2025 schedule with an 11-1 loss to the Royals at American Family Field. “Because I haven’t had any conversations of the sort.”
Selig, of course, echoed similar sentiments during his six years as acting commissioner following the owners’ decision to fire Fay Vincent in 1992. He finally accepted the job officially in 1998 and put the franchise he moved from Seattle to Milwaukee in 1970 into a trust controlled by his daughter, Wendy Selig-Prieb, who then oversaw the sale to Attanasio following the 2004 season.
During his two-decade tenure as owner, Attanasio has overseen an unprecedented level success while also establishing himself as one of the game’s more influential owners
So much so that he was interviewed for the job that eventually went to Manfred in 2015 but even then, Attanasio said he had no plans or interest in selling the team.
“I showed up for the meeting and the first questioner said, ‘why do you think you can do this job and not sell the team?,” Attanasio recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I didn’t say that.’ I said that I would not sell the team. ‘Well, don’t you think it’s a conflict? I said, ‘Yeah, I think it’s probably a conflict. But you all asked me to come in.’”
More than a decade later, Attanasio’s attitude hasn’t changed. Plans to eventually pass the franchise on to his sons Mike and Dan are already being put in place.
“My family and I love owning the team,” Attanasio said. “It’s a generational asset for us.
“I just love what I’m doing.”
Despite a recent run of success that has seen the Brewers make the playoffs six times in seven seasons, not all fans feel the same.
There has been growing discontent with Attanasio’s apparent resistance to spend more on payroll in the hopes of pushing the team to the next level. After winning 93 games and a second consecutive NL Central Division crown in 2024, the Brewers were largely inactive during the offseason and took the field on Opening Day with a payroll of approximately $96 million that ranked 24th out of 30 MLB teams.
There’s no arguing that Milwaukee is limited in terms of market-size. Though details are not made public, the Brewers are believed to have one of the smallest local television deals in baseball making them more reliant on ticket sales, sponsorships and day-of-game revenues than most teams.
Because of that, the team has invested greatly in player development — successfully — and has tried to supplement its collection of young, home-grown talent with depth pieces and under-the-radar signings.
It’s a method that has led to success and competitiveness but the lack of postseason success — the Brewers haven’t advanced past their first round since 2018 — has led to some restlessness within the fan base.
“We manage our payrolls to our revenues,” Attanasio said. “Some of the other teams in the league have benefited from, generally, a media differential. I am always hesitant to speak on it, because it sounds like I’m making excuses here, and I don’t want to make excuses.
“Even in the biggest of markets, when teams overspend to try to win, then they then generally have to take a step back. Our strategy is to not ever have to take a step back and for the way we’re running things now we, we don’t have to.
“Even the teams that are rebuilding, they went hard to win, and now they’re, in most cases, rebuilding in a way that’s intelligent – quite intelligent,” he said. “I think that we would be better as a sport if every fan in every city felt that they could compete every year. But I can say in this city, we’re going to compete every year.”
Read the full article here
