NEW YORK — For the New York Mets, the path to the team’s involvement in esports began in some ways with a bond formed decades ago.
“Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision, is middle school friends with Jeff Wilpon,” Wes Engram, the Mets’ vice president of corporate partnership & sales, noted at the NSF Summer Summit.
“Knowing Bobby for as long as I do and knowing how committed he and Activision Blizzard is in this space, it really made sense to come in,” Wilpon told CNBC.
Wilpon, co-owner and COO of the Mets, was named one of seven team owners in Activision Blizzard’s inaugural Overwatch League season earlier this month. The buy-in was reportedly $20 million and represented a major investment in esports by the owners of a big-market baseball team. It’s a level of commitment that can’t simply be explained by a middle school friendship.
Wilpon and his father, Fred Wilpon, through their Sterling Equities VC fund have looked at the esports space for a couple of years now. They invested in esports platform Skillz in 2015. With the entry into the Overwatch League — the first major global professional esports league with city-based teams — there was the opportunity to capitalize on the growing popularity of esports with a multiplayer first-person shooter game.
“It is impossible to ignore the numbers,” Engram said of esports.
“If my parents would have told me I could go play professionally and make $150,000 or go play in a tournament, I would have watched other people play. And so yeah, we believe in it. I think that esports has been around forever, for a long, long time. But it was never being monetized.”
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In recognizing the potential of esports, Jeff Wilpon jumped at a leadership role, and he said it helped that he was doing so alongside Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots who will own the Boston-based Overwatch League team. Joining forces with other elite traditional sports ownership groups in order to engage a new generation of fans was important.
“For us, it was the first opportunity that we could bring a brand presence like we do as well as Patriots,” Engram said. “At least there’s some trust there.”
And there is growth potential. For at least the first season, matches will be played at an esports arena in the Los Angeles area, as teams develop local venues for home and away play in future seasons. There will be 28 teams eventually, according to Engram and CNBC. Overwatch League teams will ultimately receive an equal share of all league-wide net revenues.
“I thought that was a great model to be able to really grow this and in five, ten years the franchise values should be quite a bit more than they are today,” Wilpon told CNBC.
Down the road, Overwatch League competitions will come to New York for home team competitions.
“We don’t necessarily think Citi Field is going to be a great spot for it,” Engram said. “We’ve talked about some things. Obviously, weather is a concern, so we’ve talked about doing events out at the parking lot.”
Bringing esports to a major pro sports franchise in New York was only a matter of time as a fast-growing space like esports joins hands with America’s pastime.
“Our highest-paid employees in our organization are kids, and so they play video games, and so there is something there…Michael Conforto, our left fielder, loves playing video games. So there’s something there,” Engram said.
Added Engram with a smile, “I think that he’s better at video games than the Korean guy we’re going to hire to play esports is at baseball.”