The man with 48 baseball teams measures everything except the score

Peter Freund's company, Diamond Baseball Holdings, owns and operates 48 Minor League Baseball clubs, which the source describes as control of more professional sports teams than any other organization in the world ^[1][2]. Freund told Entrepreneur that none of those clubs is graded on the standings: "We don't measure success by a winning streak. We measure it based on the fan experience" ^[3].

That is easy to say and hard to mean, so it is worth noting that the decoupling here is structural rather than attitudinal. In most major professional sports, revenue is tied at least in part to winning; in the minor leagues, the source notes, the equation is different ^[4]. Minor League Baseball is not driven by lucrative national television deals, which means its teams are not beholden to broadcast schedules or commercial breaks ^[5]. Freund says the consequence is a different product design: no pausing for commercials, and promotions and hyper-local activations that "wouldn't play on television" and only matter to the person walking through the gate ^[6].

The clearest evidence that wins are the wrong KPI comes from the job description of the people running the clubs. Steve Cohen, general manager of the Brooklyn Cyclones and not the Mets owner of the same name, says flatly, "I have nothing to do with the players," whereas at the major league level that is precisely what a GM does ^[7]. His day-to-day work resembles a small-business owner's: sell tickets, secure sponsors, keep fans coming back, priorities the source says are mirrored across the portfolio ^[8]. A GM who does not select the roster cannot be held to the roster's results ^[9].

So what does get measured. Freund's stated objective is bringing new fans in and getting them to return, not championships ^[10], and his definition of a good night is operational: manageable lines, a greeting at the entrance, an experience that feels specific to the customer, and a fan who leaves happy even after a loss ^[11]. The company offers four numbers against that. Year-to-date in-venue merchandise sales are up double digits ^[12]. Early-season data show one in five fans left the ballpark with a souvenir ^[13]. Total announced attendance and attendance per game both rose year over year, with gains in tickets sold and in turnstile attendance ^[14]. Net Promoter Score has climbed significantly across many DBH clubs ^[15].

Read those carefully. None comes with a base value, a defined comparison window beyond "year-to-date" and "year over year", or a count of how many of the 48 clubs sit inside "many" ^[16]. They are company figures relayed in a contributor piece ^[17]. The souvenir number is the most useful of the four because it is a rate rather than a total, and the turnstile figure matters because it separates attendance from tickets sold ^[13][14].

The cost side of this model is year-round. The source says success depends on investing in the community rather than only on game days, that clubs hire locally, and that in some markets the club is a cultural cornerstone and one of the area's largest employers ^[18]. The Cyclones started the High School of Sports Management in Brooklyn, part of the Lafayette Education Complex ^[19], and send their mascot into schools to teach children about Jackie Robinson ^[20].

What to watch: whether DBH ever publishes NPS and turnstile figures with denominators attached, and whether the same double-digit merchandise growth holds in the clubs with losing records.