WORCESTER—When the 2024 Worcester Red Sox play the Norfolk Tides next season, who will the owners root for, since they own both teams?
The question of who will own the 2024 WooSox was answered this week and it is Diamond Baseball Holdings, according to multiple reliable sources. The deal will not be sealed, or officially announced, until Tuesday at the annual baseball winter meetings in Nashville.
The sale has to be approved by Major League Baseball. Its approval seems like a mere formality seeing as Diamond Baseball has already been approved as a new owner 26 times in the last three years.
Diamond Baseball is headed by two executives, Peter Freund and Pat Battle. Freund is the CEO. Battle is the executive chairman.
Freund is from the New York City metropolitan area, grew up a Yankees fan and is a minority owner of that team. He has a New England connection, being a graduate of Dartmouth College.
That may be one reason his company now owns most of the traveling teams in the Red Sox farm system. That list starts with the Triple-A WooSox and also includes Double-A Portland and Class A Salem. The only traveling Sox farm team Diamond Baseball does not own is High-A Greenville.
Freund has been involved in minor league baseball at the ownership level since at least 2009 when he bought into the Class-A Charleston River Dogs.
Also, Freund has consulted with the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball on the transition of Major League Baseball’s licensed affiliates while spearheading the formation of the MLB Draft League.
Battle has experience at the local and national level. He is a veteran in the licensing area as founder of Collegiate Licensing Co.
Diamond Baseball will be the WooSox’s majority owner, buying out most of the 11 partners. While Larry Lucchino has been the team’s primary owner since it was purchased from Ben Mondor’s heirs in 2015, he has never owned a majority of the team.
The only locally-based part of the ownership team is Ralph Crowley Jr. of Polar Beverages and he will remain involved. Lucchino will stay as team Chairman.
Diamond Baseball began buying teams in 2021. The WooSox will be its 27th, ninth in Triple-A. The other Triple-A teams the company owns are Norfolk, Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, St. Paul, Iowa, Memphis and Gwinnett in the International League; and Albuquerque and Oklahoma City in the Pacific Coast League.
The company also owns seven Double-A teams and 11 teams in the High-A and Class-A category.
Since the deal is not official, no purchase price has been announced. It is unlikely any purchase price will be formally announced, in any case. It is all speculation, and that speculation ranges from $50 million to $70 million.
In a look back at some figures that are available but unofficial: when Freund bought the Triple-A Memphis Redbirds in 2016, that price was reported to be in the $23 million range, about what Larry Lucchino and his partners paid for the Pawtucket Red Sox in 2015.
In Diamond Baseball’s relatively short history, it has purchased teams and retained their staff.
This time, the company has bought a franchise whose roots are a bit tangled, but go back in time by several decades. Mondor bought the team from the International League in 1977 and it was sold to Lucchino in 2015.
Before 1977, the franchise that is now the Worcester Red Sox was abandoned or foreclosed on by the league three times.
In 1968 the bankrupt Toronto Maple Leafs of the International League were bought by Walter Dilbeck for $65,000 and moved to Louisville. After one year there the team was $160,000 in debt and seized by the league. The International League sold it to William Gardner, a nephew of Boston Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey.
Gardner forfeited the team back to the league in 1972 when its ballpark was slated for demolition. Joe Buzas bought it and moved it to Pawtucket. He sold it to Phil Anez; Anez had it taken back by the league and that’s when Mondor stepped in.
So, going back to 1968, Diamond Baseball is the franchise’s seventh different owner.
Until the last few years, none of the franchise’s previous owners could ever have imagined it would become one of the hottest properties in professional baseball, but that’s what the Worcester Red Sox are today.
Bill Ballou covered the Red Sox for the Worcester Telegram from 1997 through 2018. He has covered pro hockey in Worcester since 1994 and currently does a weekly column for the Worcester Red Sox. Ballou can be reached at vetgoalie@aol.com
