Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. Hi everyone, welcome to the Deal.
I'm Jason Kelly alongside my partner Alex Rodriguez. All right, Alex, this week something a little bit different kind of I went a little rogue, like I went away from the deal for just a few minutes.
You know, you have your businesses.
I have mine, And I did an interview with a guy who I think it's fair to say as a hero of yours, cal Ripken Junior. It's part of a series that I'm doing for Bloomberg Originals called power Players.
You got a chance to watch it, I.
Mean an icon of icons, right, Jason, I'm so excited about this.
First.
I don't know if you know this, but col was my hero growing up. My mother bought me a great poster I think for like my ninth birthday, which lived on top of my bed till I graduated from high I might have been a rook.
He's still at eighteen.
It was still there because he was the tallest shortstop, right he was six four two twenty five. He gave me hope that someone tall like me can't play shortstop. And I think Derek Jeter had the same inspiration as well. But I love Cal for so many reasons because he is the epitome of sticking with it. He is the epitome of what I call narrow and deep. I mean, if you think about it, for the last forty five years,
he's done two things. He's played baseball at a Hall of Fame level, and two he's taught baseball to little kids, And I think it's just wonderful.
I too, grew up watching Cal Ripken.
I mean I remember, like so many people do, watching him break that record. When you think about sort of the best known athletes of our time, especially when you and I were younger, he's up there.
I mean, there's no one like.
Him in many ways, Jason. He is almost single handily responsible for bringing baseball back after the nineteen ninety four strike, which I was.
A part of.
Yes, and look, you were in George Sound in the early nineties and he was breaking records right down the street from you, which phenomenal.
Yeah, it was fascinating to spend time with him. So I went down to Aberdeen, which you know is kind of in the middle of nowhere. It's like, if you've ever driven down ninety five from New York to DC. You pass by this complex, it's sort of like sitting up on this hill and as you go back there and I mean, you would dig this so much. He's focused on teaching baseball to little kids, particularly with his foundation, but the business is much bigger than that Ripkin Baseball.
It's centered around three baseball complexes, one in Aberdeen, the one I visited, one in Tennessee, and one in South Carolina. Each of these places has replicas of world class baseball stadiums, places you're very familiar with Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium. And what Cal, his brother, and the team do is they really sell the Ripkin experiences to young players. And those experiences include training camps, on site tournaments, stuff like that.
And this is going to be I think a generational asset for the Ripkin family. Obviously, Rippin Senior started the legacy. Everything's around him and what he taught Billy Ripkin and cow and I believe Ryan, his son, Cal Ripkin's son will ultimately one day maybe take over this business. Who also played college baseball at the University of South Carolina.
That's right, yeah, And it's also interesting too because this gets right into the heart of what we talk about in the show every week because Cal and his brother Billy, they did a deal. They got into business with Josh Harrison, David Blitzer and Unrivaled. You know, a couple episodes ago, we were talking to Jesse Jacobs about the TCG investment
into Unrivaled and all the ambition around youth sports. One of the interesting things that I discovered, which which Alex I think you will appreciate too, is this idea of when I first saw that deal, I thought, oh, okay, well that's nice.
Billy and Cal like built.
This business and you know, sort of get paid and go off and do something else, when in fact, they were doubling down and they are making this bigger and bigger and part of this big empire.
The deal.
I want to just kind of lean in here a little bit because from Afar Jason, you knew that Cal and Billy were working on something around sports. It was very admirable, but you never thought about the business. You looked at it more. At least I did as a civic duty to Cal Senior's voice that Billy and Cal were kind of bringing onto the next generation, and all of a sudden, two of the Titans buy into the business.
Josh Eris and David Blitzer as you mentioned, and you go, oh, these guys do not get involved unless it's top tier, and they know how to scale a business, they know how to recruit world class and now they have turbo charges business. I would think about it as Facebook buying Instagram and off they go.
Yeah, oh wow, that's a great analogy. I hadn't thought about that. Anyway, it was fascinating to do. I knew you would like it, so I'm.
Glad you got a chance to watch it.
Without further ado. Here's Power Players. Kyl Ripkin, Welcome back to the deal. I'm Jason Kelly. Well, as you heard me talk to Alex about, I have this whole other life outside of him. I do another series for Bloomberg called Power Players, and it's a super exciting series for me because I get to go and visit really influential people in the broader sports world. I traveled all over the world for this season, but actually for the premiere,
I didn't have to go that far. I got in my car and I drove down to Aberdeen, Maryland to see none other than Cal Ripken Junior, the iron Man himself and I showed up to this incredible complex that's there that Cal and his brother Billy have built and really expanded over the years. It's the cornerstone of their youth baseball empire. So you have to keep in mind. You drive up to this and there are baseball fields as far as the eye can see. It's just off
of I ninety five. There's even a hotel there where players can stay. And it's built to mimic Camden Yards, which of course is the famous ballpark in Baltimore where Cal and Billy and his dad, Cal Senior all hung around and played baseball and managed baseball for so many years.
Here's Cal Ripken. I'm going to go.
Back aways and ask what I think is a pretty obvious question. I'm going to read stats that you know very well, and eighty four hits, four hundred and thirty one home runs, two Golden Gloves, Rookie of the Year, most Valuaball player times, two World Series champion, and of course the most famous setheator.
But I know it's two.
Thousand, six hundred and thirty two consecutive games played unmatched career.
Why are you doing this?
Let me give you a.
Perspective Now, someone just reminded me of the day that you played twenty one years with the Orioles in and around here, and now you've been out of the game twenty two years.
Wow.
So that's a forty three year window, a chunk of time when you retire from baseball. I mean, you have a wonderful career. And I was forty one. I got to play a long, long time. But you're not ready to pack it in. You're ready to do something. And I enjoyed the feeling that I got, or I hate to use the word platform, that you get from being a player. I always enjoyed the influence you had with kids. I always enjoyed the game of baseball. I always enjoyed
what Dad represented about baseball. My first fourteen years of my life was following him around in the minor leagues as a manager and then get a chance to come to the big leagues and then have a big league career. And so Dad communicated through kids, through clinics and baseball and all that. He was a great teacher, but he kind of talked about life through baseball, and so Billy and I wanted to extend that from a content teaching standpoint.
You know, I thought we could help players be a little bit better, but experientially, that's what Billy and I valued, and we wanted to try to bring that sort of experience to the kids. So I didn't look at it as a money making entity. At first. It seemed like it was more philanthropic. And then you realize that if you're going to do this, it's got to wash its own face. No matter how well you did or how much money you put aside, the model has to work.
And it seemed like in the early days there was opportunities. There was abundant opportunities everywhere. We could go down any path that we wanted to go down, and I think many times we were going down too many paths. And it wasn't until we started to really think what are we good at, what can we really do for the kids that we started to make the business side work. But when you look at it now, that couldn't be more proud. Some of the complexes that we visit and
that we have under our control. Now it's the same sort of feeling in all the complexes for the kids. You know, sometimes I say baseball is dying in a way, you know, from a youth standpoint, less people are playing, but of the less people that are playing, more of them are playing more baseball. But you see the spirit capture the spirit of baseball, just like it was when Billion and I were kids. You feel like the whole
world revolves around baseball. When you're in it. It's fun, it's great, and we couldn't be more proud of of contributing to some of that happiness and some of that joy that Billy and I felt.
Tell me about those early days and sort of getting into it. I mean, you're retiring from baseball. You and Billy are trying to figure out that next chapter, Like what are those conversations like as you're kind of doing that trial and error.
Billy and I are a little different in the fact that I'm optimistic and you think you can do anything, you know, especially coming off your baseball career, and now you're getting into this.
I dreamed a little bit bigger.
Billy is more practical, and so we always had conversations every time you come in. You know, you blow things up and you make it bigger, and let's do this, let's start small. And so I think the lesson that both him and I learned probably more me was that it has to make business sense, and maybe planning would
have been a little bit better. But in many ways you're learning as you go, and I think one of the lessons what you learn when you go through the minor leagues is that you don't know how good you're going to be. You just got to keep doing things and trying things and out how you do it, and then keeping those things in disregarding the other ones. In this it seemed like we were trying new things going
on in all different directions. Maybe a better business plan wouldn't have been the right way to start, maybe not, but.
Things What were some of the things you tried that didn't work? If you remember.
Well, again, it was pretty capital intensive to do the fields. The story with the warehouse here, I wanted to have a building that would give the kids a feel and there was a development opportunity, but first we thought of it as a office building. We would have done really bad if we did the office building. And then we started to look into it, and then the feasibility studies came back about what about a hotel that's right off ninety five, et cetera, et cetera. So going down that
path of getting that done. I take great pride in the fact that we had to convince Bill Marriott to change the branding of the box to allow us to do this. It's a double Marriott hotel. And that meeting was a little nerve wracking going down there and trying to present your vision what you want to do.
Because Bill was really quiet.
You didn't say a word, which made you feel like you had to present more and to keep pitching, you know, and saying, Okay, he's not getting I'm dying here.
But at the end he kind of gave.
A little cheapish smile and says, I get it. You know, we'll do it. Yeah, And that was a good feeling. But just some of the things you run into, how do you get the fields built, how do you run your tournaments, the teaching entity. It seemed like everybody trusted their kids with us, and we were thinking, Okay, they're all going to be about the same baseball level. These are all baseball intense kids or whatever else. But then you realize that there's a big range of skill level.
So then you had to get your curriculum, so to speak, where everybody could benefit. And then sometimes we went through a period. Well, we'll just evaluate them real quick, and then we'll put them in different groups, and then we'll be able to give them the more advanced kids, some more advanced, we'll give them the kids that need a little more simple, more simple. But when you start throwing a number of kids in there, the numbers become overwhelming,
and you got to trying to figure that out. So I think that's probably normal growing pains in any sort of business that you the realities of what you're thinking. What you're thinking is not always the reality.
Yeah, you know you mentioned that the Bill Marriott story, And I do wonder what that feeling is like for you because, and I'll say it in a way that you would never say it. It's like you're cal Ripkett, Like you're used to walking into a room of people like what do you need?
What can I do for you? You're my hero.
I've been to a fan since I was a kid, and here, like, you're not just like asking for something, You're asking for a big something.
What's that feeling like for you?
There is an advantage to having that sort of reputation or that sort of name. We could get a meeting with most anybody. We want to get a meeting with. But the hard part is what.
Do you do then?
And that's what we're worried about all the time, is that substantively it has to match what your persona is, I guess and I never thought, you know, we're baseball players. Now we're getting into some areas which I think Billy probably helped to pull us back down a little bit now because I kept thinking, well, let's we can talk to this person, we can talk to that person, Let's do this, let's do that. Billy said, let's do this, And so Billy probably grounded us a whole lot more.
And I kept thinking, because you could get a meeting with anybody else. And I think we're generally feeling that we could partner, you know, And maybe that was a philanthrope more than philanthropic view that we have, Like with the foundation, we feel if you want to help kids, then.
We're with you. Let's all do it together.
In a business sense, you have to think a little differently how that works, but still a partnering sort of idea, bringing different resources to the table was a good thing and you just have to figure out how that all works.
Yeah, So tell me about the sort of initial concept like going way back to this place where we're sitting, if you.
Want to go back to the seed of the idea. Well, I mean Dad ended up leaving baseball, and Dad at a baseball school, and Billy left baseball before I left baseball, and then Billy did some of the baseball school stuff.
He kind of ran it.
And I always had the vision when I stopped is that we were looking for places to bring Dad's baseball school into Aberdeen or to have the fields. And then we bumped into an effort too for the minor league team that they were looking at the same time. We looked at each other, you know, because we were looking at similar spots here in Aberdeen, and we decided to
come together. So I helped them, and I thought the vision of creating a kid's complex, a teaching facility to play tournament games here, and also you would have the vision of the start of a pro career over there, so you could actually then carry that over and watch like the next phase. If you're really good and you get up the ladder of high school, you get drafted, and all of a sudden, now this is where you go. And then obviously we have Cameron Yards down the street
where you can see the big big league product. So that was sort of the vision coming in and how we were going.
To do that.
Billy and I liked celebrating the individuality of a field. Like from a design standpoint, we didn't like quads. You know, they're the most efficient use of your space, but they're angled in four areas and balls are flying everywhere. We wanted to make each field have its own identity. And then we liked the fact that we played in Fenway where there's a green monster. You know, the game can be played a little bit differently based on the dimensions.
That's the beauty of baseball. And so we set out to do that in the design aspect of here. So kind of go on teeter and back and forth. From a business standpoint, I retired from baseball. I took on the whole project myself over here. We didn't have a
team for the minor league team. I had to find a team, move a team, go through territorial issues with the Phillies, the Orioles, and the Wilmington Blue Rocks that was down the street and the Orioles, Mister Angelos created an affiliate to get in the New York Penn League team, but somebody else had to get out of the New
York League. So all that happened in the time that I retired and your building a stadium, which I was on the hook for the third of that was on the hook for have a team at the time, so my focus went immediately over there.
Billy's focus was.
A little bit more in the start of this side of the of the street, the kid's side, that was a resounding success in the minor league team over there, we found a team, came in, we sold it out for the first ten or twelve years, and then the kid's side was developed a little bit more slowly. But now when you look at it, we've maximized our lot. We got a number of fields over here. We have a good following, good reputation all the way around, and it's fun to come on the complex and see how
the two stadiums interact. But the seed of it was just to be able to help kids out and create an experience. And really Dad was really interesting because Dad kept his baseball school small, smaller so he could have one on one interaction with the kids. He didn't want to make it so big. I was of the thing is, well, we can make it really big and we can help
more kids. Billy was more like my dad, so we had sort of a model in there in between where we wanted to be more hands on so that we would get a chance to teach and move through like Dad's model.
Yeah, we got to talk about your dad.
I mean, his name, his ethos clearly is so deeply baked into this.
This is the family business.
I mean, there's no other family that is probably as deeply embedded in this sport as as yours. Like, how does that influence your decision making? How does it influence the way that you and Billy have decided to do this as businessmen?
Huh, Well, I would look at it a little different than that. The family business was professional baseball because Dad was in professional baseball. I guess if you add it up close to forty years maybe and first fourteen years as in the minor leagues, the Oriels were a great organization. They were developing players and Dad was part of sending the players to the big leagues.
And then right in my high school year.
He had a chance to come to the big leagues as a coach, and I got a chance to experience a little bit of that, but the family business wasn't using you know, our success in baseball to actually expand on that.
I mean that that was a night away in baseball. That was the idea of Billiy and I. So it was more of the professional.
Side, and I think sometimes you've learned so much by playing so long at the highest level and you want to have that sort of talent that you want to deal with. So I think Billy a lot of times was thinking about that, and then you in some ways you got to go all the way back to the beginning and then simplify and start to build the blocks up for how you're going to help, you know, a talented kid become a better baseball player.
It's interesting too that your dad very early on saw that sort of teachable aspect of the game and really embrace that.
It sounds like well with his school and I.
Think he always had a soft spot for kids that especially didn't have a good fatherly influence, you know, and he was a.
Fatherly influenced in the minor leagues.
You know, kids were coming in right out of high school, your first time away from home or first time doing you know, a lot of these things, and so he was looking out for them as well as trying to make them big leaguers. And so that sort of legacy started us in creating the foundation in Dad's name to use baseball the way he did to get in front of kids, kids that didn't have all the same advantages, and we would give them an opportunity to move in
a positive direction. That was sort of Dad's impetus. And so it all played in the experiential side when you're actually doing tournaments and all that kind of stuff, you're feeding from, you know, Dad's thoughts to do things the right way. He used to always say, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. You know, you make more of a mess of it if you do it halfway. You got to go back and do it again and again,
those sorts of things. So Dad's voice and Dad's thoughts are in, you know, our every day thinking process.
But it does get confusing.
You have the Cawrochmen Senior Foundation is that we we target kids and use baseball in which to get in.
Front of them.
Yeah, and now that's expanded all across the country. You know, we're doing we call them youth development parks where we've built, you know, over one hundred and fifteen, one hundred and twenty of those by now, which costs a million a million.
And a half dollars a pop.
And it's all to give them a safe place in these areas in which to do anything they want. It's a sports field. And then now we're even into stem centers. You know, we're getting into curriculum in schools and those sorts of things, and the success we've had there, you know,
it has been good. So a lot of times when people look at it's hard to separate the work that you do for the foundation under Dad's name, and then also under the name that you're doing for building kids complexes and having an experience, a tournament experience, and also you know, a teaching one. So the growth of those things have kind of side by side in some ways.
In the early days, I was thinking the foundation, we hard well, built a board really well, and that grew really fast, and you know, you could see the success of having the right people in the right places. This side was a little bit more slow. We had people that might have been the right people at the time. But then you know, as you're going you get your team together and you're building the model because it's interesting. You build a model first, and then you could duplicate
it some other place to help more kids. But I think that we were trying to duplicate the model before we had the model in some ways interesting. And Dad would say about that. He says, you're getting too big for your briches. And that's where Billy's practical sort of common sense would say, here, let's do this.
Let's do this first. I'm thinking, but we can do this. We have influence in there.
We can go to California, we can go right and they're saying, come on back.
So one of the things I was especially interested to talk to Cal Ripkin about was coming together with David Blitzer and Josh Harris. These are two private equity tycoons who have gone heavy into the world of sports. They own a bunch of professional sports teams, including the Washington Commanders, Philadelphia seventy Sixers, and more. They've also made a huge bet on the world of youth sports. And so I asked Cal what it was like when he first met
up with David Blitzer. So, tell me about like the coming together with but I mean, do you remember meeting him vividly.
The interesting part about being cal Ripken is that, as I said that, you can get a meeting or talk and to me, I always thought anybody ever met when to talk baseball. And then I was thinking, Okay, we'll talk a little baseball, and then I'll ask business questions because now you have someone hugely successful that have gone through and they have all this information that so you're trying to grab something back. You're giving the baseball inside
stories and you're saying, but what about this? And I remember that because David helped sort of organize, you know, some of the business thoughts, because as I communicate our success or our path, it seems like we were all over the place, and because opportunity was pretty abundant. But it's still you've got to focus on what you're doing
and you got to build a model. And I remember asking him for advice or how to do this, or just some of the concepts, and he was very open and I think that we had a good interaction back and forth. What I would say was when I first went into business, you're thinking, okay, look, I'm overmatched. I was twenty years in baseball. I was playing a game over here. Now I gave everybody else twenty or twenty five years a head start, you know, and now I
got to catch up. But then the process is you realize the success that you had in the sport, some of the principles and values, the way you go about things or whatever it is, they definitely moved towards the business side. And so it's just kind of understanding how to place your work ethic, your persistence, and all that kind of stuff into another model. So I've learned a heck of a lot by being a baseball player for twenty years, right, And the part about it was how do you apply those things?
And I remember that meeting and that it was sort of an application or this is how you apply it, this is how you do it.
So I was asking him a lot of questions and we did hit it off pretty well, and so then we went off and started to have a little bit more success and started to organize our business a little bit better. He was doing what David does and talk about has his hand in a lot of things and his love for sports, and he was going through the
youth sports. At the time, we were trying to make some sense out of parents' roles in the experience, putting pressure on the kids and all that kind of stuff, and this is what we wanted to try to create together.
How does it culminate into an actual business relationship because it's cool to be swapping stories and giving advice, but like to actually put your businesses together is a whole other thing.
Well, I mean, he.
Had an interest in and he had some assets in the youth baseball business. One of those assets we were talking to them about running, you know, because they would have to ramp up and this.
Village.
And so that's where we sort of came back together. And I really had no intention of kind of merging you know, our business interests at the time. But the more we talk, the more they liked our management staff, and we got a really good management team and we were at the right place at the right time, I think, and they said, Okay, before we grow things separately, why
don't we consider growing together. And the growth part of that was really interesting to me because that's the big picture analysis again, is we were growing, but we were growing sort of in a controlled way, and then every time that you had an opportunity or something comes in, then you got to figure out, Okay, how do I raise the money for this?
How do we do that?
And David of course brought a sophistication to you know, high little business that all of a sudden it's a good idea and it makes sense business wise or whatever else. Capital is not going to be you know, an issue. This is how you do it, and so all of a sudden we felt I felt that the growth could be accelerated, and I wanted to be able to move, you know, at different parts of the country and expand
on the good work that we were doing. So then once we start, it took us about six months back and forth talking before we thought this was a good idea. But I couldn't have asked for a better partner to come in. And you know, the idea of expanding to other sports and then using the same model to have tournaments and get in other sports, that sort of upside, that sort.
Of growth really interests me. So yeah, that was why I came in.
Yeah, and it's interesting to look at that, I mean because at first, blush cynical business journalists that I am, I see the announcement, I'm like, oh that's cool, Like, you know, Callumbilly have built their business and now they're selling out.
Then you look at it and you're like, oh no, no, no, no, no, they're like doubling down. They're like selling in in a lot of ways.
So it's like, was that that was always the plan or what was it that really like struck you about this particular opportunity.
David and Josh love the brand. We had private equity take a run at us a number of times over the years, and I had one of the private equity person we have a fund, you know, we have the own majority of the fund, Da da da da, and we're saying we can monetize your brand way better than you are. And I took that a little bit personal, thinking, well, you probably could, but it's our name, it's what we're building, whatever else, it's support And that didn't interest me, you know,
in those days. But then once you're talking to David and Josh, they really liked the brand and they wanted to expand the brand in the same way that we were thinking about expanding. Now, of course we can accelerate it a little faster and grow a little faster because of the partnership. But I was convinced and comforted that we were all on the same page. It wasn't just about trying to roll things together and then bundle up assets and then sell them in a short period of time.
This is a longer term view. Yeah, And I really like the longer term view. And the kids business has been a fun business. You know, sometimes it's crazy because parents are probably the ones that you have to worry about the most. Because everybody feels that they have their star athlete and they're going to put everything, all their resources into getting that person to college and getting into pro ball.
They're telling cal Ripkin that they are son is the next cal Ripkin.
Right, So it brings along a little of that, and we try to help because to me, one of our general philosophies, and maybe it's more me, is that.
Let's try to take pressure off the kids.
It seems like the way that you're playing more games, there's more travel, there's more at stake, there's pressure that's being applied to them. And I tell parents just on the side, I go, you know, try to think of ways where you can alleviate some of that pressure, that you can make them enjoy the game and all that, because if they have the talent to make it, they're going to have to call on that their internal love of the game when they get to the hard parts,
when they get to the pro balld. It's got to be from within. It can't be from you know, somebody else forcing me to do this. It's got to be that your love of it that carries you through those challenging and difficult times. When you go from being a big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a very big pond, that's when you have to tap into your love. And this is the time that you hope that you're cultivating a love of the sport that they want to wear their uniform to bed for
a game tomorrow. That's how I used to feel. You don't want to kill that joy and love. And by playing so much baseball and making it more serious and professional at a earlier time, you run the risk of doing that.
I hadn't done the math like you did at at the beginning of the conversation about you know, essentially you've now spent just slightly more time in business in post career as you did playing baseball.
So what's your assessment at this point? How do you like it?
I think I'm given way more credit than it's due number one, not to play down We've had success, and it's feel good success because I would imagine, if you want to spend your money, you want to look at it from a straight money standpoint. And maybe David will convince me differently now that we're partners and we see
the big market. I think that I probably could have taken the money that you were seeding the business and keeping the businesses rolling that if you invested it someplace else, you would have done a whole lot better, but it wouldn't have given you the same feeling of accomplishment. And then this was an area I thought in business. I liked the minor league baseball model in business because it was something I was familiar with, you know, and so you learn business as you go in a model that
you're comfortable with and the kid's business side. I don't know if there was other models that really supported what we were trying to accomplish. And I don't know if we even knew fully what we were trying to accomplish. What it's what we knew how to do from a baseball standpoint, yeah, and so trying to make a business out of that was fun. And so you know, twenty some years into it,
extremely proud of what we've been able to do. But a lot of times I think people over state and give me more credit than I actually deserve.
Yeah, one thing that also strikes me that especially you know, walking around here and then talking to David and hearing you talk about it, is this name. You know, your name, Billy's name, you know your dad's name. There's a tremendous amount of value in it. Clearly, I would also think you feel very protective of it too, And so as you grow the business, you know, you hear Roger Goodell talk about, you know, don't tarnish the shield.
You hear you know the.
Dallas Cowboys, don't tarnish the star, Like, how do you ensure that you don't tarnish Ripken.
By trying to make good decisions?
The name enlightness thing is everywhere now and so when you start to think about essentially building a brand and all that kind of stuff, I think people now in sports are thinking about building the brand before the brand is built. And to me, the brand is built by a collection of your choices and your decisions over time and what your name resents. And then you have something that has some sort of credibility or some sort of
meaning to me. It's not artificially built. It's built, you know, over time, and so we value that and we want to protect that. I think some of the deals that we made, some of the marketing deals over my time, there was always a what's the clause called a good citizen type clause that protected them if you did something stupid or something that they could get out of the contract,
and I'd always insist on it back. I'd always say, okay, fine, I'll do that to you, but if something happens to the company, you know, I want the same sort of thing back. And maybe that gives you a little bit idea of how we think about it.
That's great.
Now, a couple decades into being a business person, have you been able to sort of like distill down like what a cal Ripken deal is or the type of business relationship you want to be a part of.
I think the most fundamental part is the people. The quality of people that you're considering partnering with, the quality of people that you bring in to your organization to manage others. If I can use sort of the Oriel example for a minute, when you go through a rebuilding process.
You've got to get the right.
Person at the top that trickles down and then they consequently hire people and then you have to give them responsibility and trust and those sorts of things. So I think that's a normal part, but it begins with the people.
Yeah, I remember in the endorsement world.
I mean I had no training in figuring out what choices do you make in the endorsement work, so you had to go back on your instincts and my instincts. I think I had a pretty lucrative jockey underwear offer in front of me in my first or second year, and I had also one side, I had a local milk opportunity. So he had these two opportunities you're weighing out, and I couldn't see myself posing in my underwear, and so I turned down that because it didn't feel.
Like it was me, like it was authentic enough. You know, that's not who I was. I'm not.
Jim Palmer had great success in it, and it's wonderful for him, but it didn't work for me.
So I started thinking.
It's got to work for me, and local milk worked.
You know, I drank a lot of milk grown up. I thought, that's how I got some of my size. It was sort of a secret ingredient that was easy and it worked. So when you're making these decisions, sometimes you have to fall back just on your instinct and trust your instinct a little bit more. I mean, you
had confidence that I built in baseball. I mean if I was trying to hire a manager, if I was in a position to hire a manager for a team, I would know what questions to ask, you know, to figure out what kind of manager of that baseball guy that he would be. When you get into business, it's not always that clear, so you have to lean on other people with expertise. It says, Okay, if we're hiring a CFO, you've got to evaluate the.
Financial part of his job.
But I can tell you if I like him, or I can assess certain things from the interview, but I can't do it all. So and many times you have to then come back to your instincts and say, okay, now what Yeah, that's great, and trust your instincts.
The Deal is hosted by Alex Rodriguez and me Jason Kelly. This episode was made by Victor eveyas Stacy Wong. Annamazaakus and Lizzie phillip Ar. The music was made by Blake Maples, Brendan Francis. Neonham is our executive producer. Sage Fouman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Additional support from Kelly Laferrier, Ashley Hoenigg, Rachel Scaramzzino, and Elena So Los Angeles. Part of this episode of the Deal featured my interview from the series Power Players. That's a show that's hosted by
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