Bob Bowman (executive)

Bob Bowman was the President of Chief Executive Officer of MLB Advanced Media from 2000 to 2017. This subsidiary of Major League Baseball was responsible for making radio and television broadcasts available to fans through a single platform, MLB.TV, and also for standardizing the internet presence of the league and its team through a single address, mlb.com. Prior to the creation of the company, each team ran its own website, with little common direction, and games were available directly from the broadcasters. MLB Advanced Media created a business model based on a paid subscription, with revenue shared among all teams, a first step towards revenue sharing and a reduction of the structural economic inequalities that were the cause of so much labor strife in the 1990s.

Bowman was also a pioneer on the technological side, as mlb.com went from providing choppy coverage that required a huge bandwith to be viewed properly, to high-definition broadcasts of all major league games (as well as a number of spring training contests) available on a wide variety of devices. In addition to streaming live games, the company is responsible for mlb at-bat, the application that allows fans to follow a game in progress on a smartphone, Statcast, which provides advanced data on in-game events, and PITCHf/x, a strike zone tracking system. These applications generated billions of dollars in new revenue for teams through both subscription fees and advertising and made Major League Baseball the most successful sports league in reaping benefits from the development of internet-based technologies.

Bowman announced his resignation following the 2017 season, explaining that with the recent sale of BAMTech, the company behind the technological improvements powering MLB's on-line presence, to the Walt Disney Company, it was time for new leadership to take over. However, word leaked out in December that he had not resigned but been forced out as a result of years of inappropriate behavior towards subordinates, including physical assault against a member of the Boston Red Sox ownership group, and maintaining a toxic atmosphere towards female staff members. These problems had apparently been known to MLB for a time, as they had been brought to the attention of former Commissioner Bud Selig, who had failed to act. It was apparently an incident in October, in which he verbally berated a subordinate in public, that pushed Rob Manfred to finally ask for Bowman's resignation, as he had been warned on previous occasion about behavior that could be construed as harassment.