Business Insight Zone

Today’s Company of the Day is Major League Baseball.

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For baseball fans, it’s the most wonderful time of the year: the League Championship Series are getting underway and the World Series is right around the corner. For Major League Baseball, the past few years have been a pretty wonderful time year-round: the league and its clubs are making more money than ever, and even though baseball has taken a back seat to football, the game’s popularity is well-entrenched. Maybe even more surprising, labor harmony has reigned for many years now.

It wasn’t so long ago, in historical terms, that the rift between players and management led to the debacle of the 1994 season, in which a work stoppage meant that the World Series was cancelled for the first time in 90 years. But the league rebounded across the second half of the 1990s, thanks especially the successful culmination, in 1995, of the Orioles‘ Cal Ripken to break Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-games record and the epic home-run battle between the Cardinals‘ Mark McGwire and the Cubs‘ Sammy Sosa in 1998. Even the steroid scandals of recent years — which have cast all sorts of doubt on the purity of McGwire’s and Sosa’s performances, not to mention the re-breaking of all home run records by Barry Bonds — haven’t been able to derail Major League Baseball’s financial success.

A key driver for this success has been a wave of new stadiums — many designed by HOK Sport — modeled on Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Baseball palaces like AT&T Park in San Francisco, Miller Park in Milwaukee, and the new Busch Stadium in St. Louis have packed in the fans. Say what you like about MLB commissioner Bud Selig (he is not widely liked by fans), but he has presided over an era of prosperity unprecedented in the history of the National Pastime.

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