Brewers Community Foundation Snapshot

Staying in the NL and looking at another mid-market team: the Milwaukee Brewers, a franchise that continues to outpace many of the more moneyed teams in baseball on the field. It's interesting to look at the Brewers Community Foundation immediately after the Rockies, because these are two teams that are similar in many respects.

Attendance in 2024 was nearly identical — both right around 2.5 million fans, Rockies at 31,361 per game, Brewers at 31,323. Estimated team revenues were nearly identical too, $324M for Colorado and $322M for Milwaukee. Even franchise valuations aren't far apart, $1.475B for the Rockies against $1.6–1.7B for the Brewers. Same-size platform, roughly speaking.

And yet, just like the on-field product, the Brewers outplay the Rockies in pretty much every dimension that matters here. They raise more money — roughly 2.5x with $2.78M versus $1.09M for the Rockies Foundation — and they do more with it. Grants paid were more than double ($2.59M to $1.23M). They are similar in how they operate, though, as both are pure pass-through grantmakers.

There is a big difference in the estimates of their respective owners' wealth, with the Brewers' owner 2-3x wealthier; to be fair, I don't see evidence that is what's driving the stronger performance of the BCF. Instead, what I see is a team that is more committed to their philanthropic efforts, and that could potentially be a downstream effect of the owner's personal philanthropic inclination.

Case in point: BCF's relationship with the Sojourner Family Peace Center goes back over a decade — by 2014 their own Executive Director was already calling it "a longstanding partnership," and in 2015 the owners, Mark and Debbie Attanasio, personally joined BCF in making a $300,000 gift toward Sojourner's $26.9 million capital campaign (unclear how much came from them personally versus the Fund), with Debbie serving as the campaign's Honorary Chairperson. The Attanasio family's philanthropy extends well outside Milwaukee too as their son Mike co-founded California Strong, a wildfire relief effort that's pulled in Brewers players like Christian Yelich and Ryan Braun for on-the-ground relief work in California.

With that said, none of this makes the Brewers a top performer league-wide. At 79.7 on IMPACT+, they're #16 of 29, solidly middle of the pack. But sitting next to the Rockies, at the bottom of the league with a nearly identical platform to work with, the gap makes something pretty clear: market size and valuation aren't destiny. The Rockies aren't underperforming because they're a small operation. They're underperforming because they're not fully leveraging a platform that, on paper, looks just as big as Milwaukee's.