In November 2003, when Milwaukee Brewers executive Rick Schlesinger, then the team’s executive vice president of business operations, first called Marti Wronski to see if she was interested in leading the Brewers’ legal department, she turned him down.
At the time, the Brewers’ $400 million baseball stadium – known then as Miller Park – was just two years old, and the club’s front office was in a rebuild mode coming off a leadership shakeup.
Wronksi had two children under the age of one and was teaching part-time at Marquette University Law School, following a five-year stint as a legal associate at Milwaukee-based firm Foley & Lardner. She wasn’t interested in the Brewers’ role, but she offered to help with the search.
When she told her husband, Andy Wronski, now head of Foley & Lardner’s Milwaukee office, he encouraged her to call Schlesinger back and explore the opportunity.
Fast forward 20 years and what started as an interim role with the Brewers – allowing Wronski to remain on the faculty at Marquette Law School for a time – has instead become a career in professional sports. Wronski has been the team’s general counsel and later senior vice president of administration. In December, she was promoted to chief operating officer, which added business analytics and strategy to her existing responsibilities overseeing the legal, information technology and human resources departments of the Brewers. It’s the title Schlesinger held with the Brewers from 2011 to 2018 until being named president of business operations.
“It’s interesting because there’s I guess some natural evolution to it,” Wronski said, reflecting on her tenure. “I’ve evolved with the organization.”
Several factors have kept her with the club: the ever-changing nature of professional sports, her drive to meet the next challenge (these days it’s Major League Baseball’s recent rules changes and post-pandemic shifts in consumer behavior), and the family-oriented culture of the team. The Wronskis’ four sons, now young adults, grew up around what is now American Family Field, climbing on dugouts and crawling on the warning track.
A leader who’s always on the move, Wronski continues to drive the small-market franchise forward into a new era of pro sports.
Learning and listening
The early days of Wronski’s career with the Brewers were all about learning. Having never worked in professional sports before, she was far more familiar with the business side of the franchise than she was with the baseball side. She remembers sitting in meetings and jotting down baseball jargon to look up later and pouring over the official MLB rulebook, “just to make sure I had as much knowledge as I could control,” she said.
She sought out colleagues who were willing to take the time to explain the nuances of the business, and that laid the groundwork for building trust and relationships.
As Wronski set to work building her legal team – from just one paralegal to now three lawyers and a paralegal – and getting the club’s legal matters in order, she was automatically exposed to the inner workings of the franchise and became fascinated with the synergies between the baseball side and the business side.
“If you’re doing your job right as in-house counsel, most discussions touch you or go through you,” she said. “I would just take it all in, and I started to learn the priorities for the different departments, how they thought about their piece of the business and then how the different pieces of the business fit together.”
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Marti Wronski
Credit: Valerie Hill[/caption]
Culture shift
Over the next several years, Wronski had a front row seat to the wave of rapid change moving through the pro sports industry, with advancements in technology and wide adoption of analytics-based strategy both on and off the field. And with that, the nature and expectations of the talent pool was changing, too.
A new generation of workers was asking more of employers. Rather than bending over backwards for a job in pro sports – as had long been the industry norm, said Wronski – employees were raising the bar for what it would take to attract them. The Brewers organization was now competing for talent amidst a much larger field, and its operations and culture would need to adapt to meet this challenge.
So, in 2017, Wronski was approached by Schlesinger and Brewers principal owner Mark Attanasio to lead a culture shift across the organization. In this role, she’d be responsible for spearheading “operational processes and efficiencies required to grow and evolve the Brewers brand,” the club described recently in announcing Wronski as one of 50 women named to the Sports Business Journal Game Changers Class of 2023.
Five years later, the organization has made “great progress,” said Wronski, but change doesn’t happen overnight.
After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it was back to square one as the entire organization had to essentially recreate how it did business for two seasons of scaled-back operations and fan capacity. But the challenges of the past three years have also called attention to additional opportunities for growth, including a heavier focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. Wronski is currently working to launch another strategic planning initiative in the next six months.
“We’re still putting these pieces together of who we are. … I don’t think it ever ends, and I don’t think you can ever take your foot off the pedal, or you’re faking it,” she said.
Paving the way
Wronski’s promotion to COO last year marked the first time the Brewers front office had named a woman to that post. Wronski will also be the highest-ranking female executive for the Brewers since Wendy Selig-Prieb led the franchise as president and CEO from 1998 to 2002 and then for three more years as chairman. Selig-Prieb herself had a hand in hiring Wronski, so the presence of female leadership in the Brewers front office wasn’t a complete anomaly to her.
But the significance of being now one of only two female COOs in Major League Baseball hit home when Wronksi received numerous letters of congratulations following the promotion announcement – from crayon drawings by young girls to words of encouragement by accomplished women Wronski had always wanted to meet. She’s since made it a priority to be available for panel discussions and conversations with other women in the industry and beyond.
“I realized pretty quickly that I looked at my role as doing better for the organization, but they looked to me for a little more than that. … When you’re put in a position of having an opportunity to do something right and better, you better do it,” she said, adding her hope is that one day there will be no more “firsts” left to celebrate.
