Mark Attanasio waited more than two decades for this moment. So after an agonizing 12-inning loss in Game 4, what was one more night?
On Wednesday at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida—44 years after their only previous World Series appearance—the Milwaukee Brewers beat the Tampa Bay Rays, 4-1, in Game 5 to deliver the franchise’s first championship. In the middle of the celebration was the 69-year-old Attanasio, who bought the team in 2005 and couldn’t help grinning from ear to ear as he hoisted the Commissioner’s Trophy.
“Milwaukee has waited 44 years, and Milwaukee, you have your world championship!” Attanasio said from the on-field stage, surrounded by Brewers players, coaches and executives. “I know that we’ve got tens of thousands of fans at American Family Field—we appreciate that you’ve all been with us the whole way, and everyone in the state of Wisconsin has gotten behind us.”
The title caps off an already-remarkable season for the Brewers, who won a franchise-record 103 games during the regular season and then swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series to avenge a loss to the same team in the same round a year earlier.
Milwaukee didn’t need the spending power of the Dodgers to do it, either. Playing in the country’s 41st-largest metropolitan area, the Brewers had a $146 million payroll this season, ranking 19th among MLB’s 30 teams, according to Spotrac.
That fact—along with the World Series appearance by the Rays, whose payroll ranked 28th—adds an interesting twist to the financial debate set to embroil baseball as the league’s collective bargaining agreement with its players expires in December. Team owners—including Attanasio—are pushing for a salary cap that they argue is necessary to improve the league’s competitive balance. But their real motivation, the players’ union says, is that the proposal would drive up franchise values.
Not that the current system has prevented owners from profiting. Attanasio, for instance, bought the Brewers for $223 million ($394 million in today’s dollars), and 21 years later, Forbes values the franchise at $1.9 billion, No. 21 among MLB’s 30 teams. Meanwhile, Attanasio, who owns an estimated 45% stake in the team, has amassed a personal fortune of $1.9 billion, according to Forbes estimates.
His path to billionaire status wasn’t the most straightforward. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1982, Attanasio joined the New York-based firm Debevoise & Plimpton, but three years in, he had little interest in the climb toward partnership and left for a career in investment banking. Moving to California, he joined Drexel Burnham Lambert, the Wall Street bank that helped popularize junk bonds, and worked in mergers and acquisitions before turning to trading. In 1991, he cofounded Crescent Capital Group, a Los Angeles-based investment firm specializing in corporate debt that now manages $53 billion in assets.
Attanasio’s love of baseball goes back much further. He grew up in Pelham Bay, a predominantly Italian American neighborhood in the Bronx where nearly everyone rooted for the Yankees. He and his brother spent their childhood playing Wiffle Ball in a church parking lot, and when the Yankees lost the 1964 World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals, a 7-year-old Attanasio walked through the neighborhood in tears, he recalled in a recent interview with a student newspaper, the ReMarker.
“I grew up with my brother flipping baseball cards, and now he’s buying a Major League Baseball team—it’s an American dream,” Paul Attanasio, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, told the Los Angeles Times in 2004, the year his older brother Mark struck an agreement to buy the Brewers from the family of Bud Selig, who had become MLB’s full-time commissioner in 1998.
Turning that dream into a winning franchise was another challenge entirely. When Attanasio took over, the Brewers were coming off 12 consecutive losing seasons.
Rather than try to force a turnaround by throwing money at expensive free agents, Milwaukee focused on developing young talent, with the team’s payroll never ranking higher than 13th in MLB during Attanasio’s ownership while the front office expanded to more than 400 full-time employees, from roughly 130 when Attanasio took over. In that time, top-notch analytics and scouting departments have consistently produced one of the game’s top-ranked farm systems, and president of baseball operations Matt Arnold won MLB’s Executive of the Year Award in both 2024 and 2025.
“We feel we have to get up this way every morning—that whatever the system is, however it looks like the cards are stacked against us, we’re going to compete,” Attanasio told MLB.com this year. “We’ve done that for 21 years.”
The strategy has paid off. In Attanasio’s first season, the Brewers finished 81-81, a 14-game improvement that ended their streak of 12 consecutive losing seasons. Three years later, they reached the playoffs for the first time since 1982. They have since become regular contenders, making eight postseason appearances in the last nine years, capturing four consecutive National League Central titles and leading MLB in regular-season victories in each of the past two years.
Attanasio—who also owns second-division English soccer club Norwich City and has invested in the Milwaukee Admirals minor league hockey team, the Athletes Unlimited Softball League and the PGA Tour’s commercial arm—has even bigger plans for the Brewers’ future. Their home stadium, American Family Field, is undergoing a major renovation, backed by roughly $500 million in public funding and a commitment of more than $100 million from the team as part of an agreement that will keep the franchise in Milwaukee through at least 2050. The improvements include a new premium space called the Truss Club, set to open in 2027.
That unveiling assumes, of course, that there is a season to be played next year—not exactly a certainty given the widespread assumption that MLB is headed for a lockout starting in December. For now, though, Attanasio and the Brewers have given Milwaukee something to celebrate: its first World Series trophy in 57 years hosting the team.
More From Forbes
FORBES | By Justin Teitelbaum
Baseball’s Most Valuable Teams 2026FORBES | By Brett Knight
America’s Richest Sports Team Owners 2026FORBES | By Hank Tucker
The Highest-Paid MLB Players 2026FORBES | By Hank Tucker
MLS’s Newest Billionaire Owner Thinks Investors Can Do Better Than Buying A Sports Team
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
Discover more from NAIRAVOICE.COM.NG
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
