Braves owner Liberty Media held its annual meeting of stockholders this week in Colorado, and most of the questions were about the conglomerate’s businesses such as satellite radio, cable TV and digital commerce.
But one stockholder had Liberty’s baseball team on his mind, asking company executives a series of questions about the business of the Braves.
Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei replied to the first question – about the progress of SunTrust Park construction – by saying the ballpark remains “on schedule for opening day in ‘17” despite some rockiness, literally.
“We’re a little behind budget, something we’ve known for a while,” Maffei said, “largely because of the act of taking out the earth. There was a substantial amount of earth that was moved. It had more rocks, cost a little more. Everything else is pretty much on (budget). More blasting (was required) than expected, than I was expecting, so that was expensive — $30 million, that number, but not crazy.”
He was asked whether the Braves have space for real estate development around the new stadium beyond what is planned in The Battery Atlanta, an adjacent mixed-use complex of shops, restaurants, bars, apartments, offices, a hotel and an entertainment venue.
“We have some other land opportunities out there, but we are building out The Battery, which is really quite impressive,” Maffei said. “Somebody here described it as maybe Larimer Square (in Denver) times seven. It’s really very impressive what’s going to be there, and I think it’ll take a while to absorb that. But we do have some optionality down the road.”
Another question: Will the Braves receive cash from Major League Baseball’s deal, announced this month, to sell a 33-percent stake in BAMTech, a video streaming company created by MLB, to Disney for $1 billion?
“We’ve never seen anything officially yet about what has been decided, but my understanding is … it’s a billion dollars going in and maybe roughly half of that may be distributed (to the 30 MLB teams),” Maffei said. “So it’s not a huge amount of money when you divide it by 30 teams.”
If half of the $1 billion is eventually distributed, that would come to $16.67 million per team. Whatever isn’t paid out to the teams will be invested in BAMTech’s continued growth.
No questions were asked at the stockholders meeting – held in Englewood, Colo., and broadcast on Liberty’s website — about the Braves’ on-field record or prognosis.
