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RubberDucks owner appointed head of Baseball Internet Rights Company
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: January 12, 2015
Many years’ working on the front lines of the technology shift in media has put the owner of Akron’s minor league baseball team on the leading edge of baseball’s tech consortium.
Kenneth (“Ken”) Babby, owner of the Akron RubberDucks minor league baseball team, has been chosen to head the minor league Baseball Internet Rights Company (BIRCO). The RubberDucks is a Double-A league affiliate of the Cleveland Indians.
BIRCO manages the digital presence and rights of all 160 minor league baseball across multiple platforms, said Babby, including all league and team websites, social media and mobile apps, he said.
These are teams, he pointed out, which have official major league affiliation. Independent teams, like Avon Lake’s Lake Erie Crushers, do not participate in BIRCO.
“I was relatively prepared for this role,” said Babby, who has owned the team since October 2012. “I was on the board for a year when I got the call asking me to take this position.”
At least one local expert outside the team organization applauds the league’s choice. “Ken Babby is perfect for that position, both for his abilities, and for his wealth of experience in the area,” said The University of Akron School of Law professor John P. Sahl, who teaches both sports law and intellectual property law at the university, and who has developed a close working relationship with Babby.
“Ken lets us run our sports law seminar at Canal Park,” home field of the RubberDucks, Sahl said.
Sahl, who said that he is a big fan of minor league baseball, also noted Babby’s relatively young age (35) as a plus in working with technology. “He comes from the younger generation that is so tied into technology. It is good for baseball, good for the minor leagues, good for the major leagues.”
Both Babby’s background and prior career path prepared him for both his team ownership and for a large role in modern technology, he said.
“We are from the D.C. area, and my father was counsel for both the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Redskins,” he said. “I didn’t realize how fortunate I was at the time growing up in that atmosphere, where talking about the business of sports was a part of the culture.”
Babby started his career path in 1999 as a summer intern in information technology with the Washington Post, where he held, “a variety of roles in marketing, technology, and revenue,” he said. By the time he left the Post, fourteen years later, he was in charge of both revenue and digital media for the newspaper.
He had no ties whatever to northeast Ohio when he was presented with the opportunity to buy the baseball team, which was named the Aeros at the time, he said. “I came out and fell in love with the community,” he said. “Three months later, I bought the team.”
In doing so, he had the opportunity to merge his interests in sports, technology and business. “My passion has always been sports, always been the fan experience,” he said. “It has been an unbelievable ride so far.”
Babby said that BIRCO, “was started years ago (2008) by Minor League Baseball, because they saw where digital was going,” he said. He took over the chairmanship of the 10-member board from Art Matin, who is affiliated with the ownership of the Erie Sea Wolves, and who had held that position since 2010.
In relationship with Major League Baseball Advanced Media LP (often called BAM), Babby said that the future of digital media in minor league baseball is extremely exciting.
One of BIRCO’s roles, “is to take the technology tools developed by BAM and scale it to our league,” Babby said.
A big step in doing that came last year, he said, when minor league baseball rolled out its official MiLB At Bat app, which adapted technology developed for the major league teams in an app that features scores, highlights, and news from all 160 minor league clubs. That app joined the In The Park app, which was released the year before.
The future of media in minor league baseball is now in Ken Babby’s hands, and he is ready to go. “There is a lot more to come,” he said.