For 20-some years, Inland Northwest minor-league sports have been synonymous with Brett Sports, which owns and operates the Spokane Indians baseball club and the Spokane Chiefs hockey team.

Bobby Brett and his three brothers bought the Indians when the club was bleeding red ink and converted it into a profitable venture. A few years later, they did the same thing with the Chiefs.

The second youngest of the four brothers, he bought the teams with older brothers J.B. and Ken—Ken is now deceased—and younger brother and baseball hall of famer George.

With the Chiefs’ season winding down and the Indians’ season still a couple of months away, we sat down with Bobby Brett to discuss the business of sports.

How did you get started in Spokane?

Bobby Brett: We bought the Indians in the summer of 1985 and closed on it at the end of the season. I made the trip up that summer. My brothers and I were looking to buy a minor league team on the West Coast.  I’d looked at seven cities, and this just happened to be my seventh stop. The first six places I visited, the town wasn’t right or the ballpark wasn’t right or something wasn’t right. So I was very discouraged. 

I landed in Spokane. I went to the ballpark,  and I stayed at the Inn at the Park. We wanted to buy a team, and this was the one I liked. You had a real airport, a real downtown with a beautiful park. I went out to the baseball park, and it was all run down, but I thought, geez, you just need a little paint, a little of this and that. So, that’s the one we bought.

It was a nice town with the real airport, then you had the history of the Dodgers here. I grew up in L.A. listening to the Dodger games on radio and Vin Scully saying, “so-and-so, just brought up from Spokane.” I always knew Spokane, since I was a little kid. I never knew where it was, but it was interesting to me that it ended up being Spokane.

Was Ken still playing major league baseball at that time?

BB: Ken was broadcasting at that time.

But George was still playing? 

BB: George was still playing, right.

And you had played.

BB: I played with the Royals in the minor leagues. I played in Billings, Mont., and then in San Jose. But I wasn’t real good. For me, I had a college degree, and I had things I wanted to do anyway. I thought, if baseball didn’t work out, I wanted to be a teacher and a coach. I did that for a year, then I had a career-path change, and I got in the real estate business.

You bought the Indians in 1985. Was it still a Dodgers affiliate at that time?

BB: No, the Dodgers had left three years before. When we bought it, it was the second or third year of short-season single A. You can imagine the town had triple A for so many years. Triple A, one rung from the major leagues, had left, and now you’re down to short-season single A. There was a mass exodus of fans, sponsors, and interest. 

The group that put a Northwest League team in here, they did just mediocre. I look back, and the timing was good. When we took over, we convinced the county commissioners to do some improvements, and we spent some money on improvements, and it started a renaissance. It was the first time anything major had been done to the park since it had been new. 

Was the team profitable when you bought it? 

BB: No. In triple A, they always lost money, and in the two years it was short-season A, it lost money. When we bought the team, the recordkeeping was not very good. They were losing money, and we didn’t know how much. 

The game plan for us was, hey, let’s go buy a minor-league baseball team. Hopefully, we won’t lose too much money. And hopefully, when we go to sell it in a few years, we’ll get our money back. I pride myself on being a businessperson. You try to do prudent things and act responsibly, but that was the business plan. And I knew nothing about it. We just thought it would be kind of fun.

We hired Tom Leip as our first general manager. He had been working in Eugene. He did a good job of getting things organized and turned it around. He was with me several years before he left. The first year, we might have broken even. Then after that, we started making a little bit of money, and it was just fun. 

At what point did hockey come into the conversation?

BB: A couple of years later, the hockey team was struggling, and Tom Leip came to me and said, “Hey, we should buy the hockey team.” I said, “Aw, geez, Tom. I’m real busy.”

In 1990, Tom came to me again and said, the Chiefs are going to be sold. We should look at it. I had gotten married in ’88 and we had a kid in ’89. I was living in Manhattan Beach, Calif., which is a great area to live if you’re single or married with no kids, but it’s a hard area to raise a kid with all the stuff that happens at the beaches in California. 

I thought, if we buy the hockey team, maybe I’ll move up there for six months and get it off the ground and see how I like it. Six months has turned into 20-some years now. 

I’m probably Spokane’s biggest booster in Southern California. It’s a wonderful community with wonderful people and a great place to raise a family. 

But without getting married and having a kid, I probably don’t buy the hockey team. 

Did you inherit the same situation with the hockey team as you did with the baseball team?

BB: Well, it was the same thing. If I recall, they were losing over $200,000 a year. But Tom told me, we can utilize some savings and staff. We need to improve the customer service. The other owner was out of town. You’re perceived as local. Even though we lived out of town, we were part of the community. We paid our bills on time. We joined the Chamber, all those things you do. 

Pretty much immediately, we were welcome with open arms, and I could never believe it. I never got treated like that California guy moving up. I felt like I got treated way better than I should be treated. 

To have success in any business, you need local ownership in a perfect world, and that owner has got to be visible. If there’s a problem or an issue, you’ve got to handle the issue. I had a good wing man in Tom, and I really enjoyed being around all of the people and meeting all of the people. I had a ball coming up and working sports every day rather than in Southern California, where I worked real estate. 

To this day, I think to myself, I wouldn’t trade my life with George or anybody. I think I’ve got the best job in the world. That’s why I’m never retiring. 

How long did it take to make hockey profitable?

BB: We wrote our first budget, and we had to fudge on our first budget to only lose $25,000. However, we had a great team. We had tremendous success. Then with a long playoff run, we had a profitable first year. 

It was unbelievable. Even though we were playing in the old “Boone Street Barn,” people came out. Our crowds got better as the year went on, and it ended up being a really good year. When you get in the playoffs, you’ve got an extra 10 to 12 home games, which is good. You’re winning and more people are coming out. 

Tell me about the revenue streams for minor league sports. 

BB: It’s mainly ticket sales. One of my guys says, if you look at it as a money tree, the tree trunk is ticket sales. If you sell tickets, they’ll buy souvenirs. They’ll buy hot dogs. They’ll buy popcorn. And when you sell tickets and people show up, then the sponsors recognize that and you get more sponsors. I don’t know the percentage, but everything is ticket driven. If you sell tickets, everything else falls in line.

How much of your ticket sales are season tickets versus single-game tickets?

BB: I don’t know exactly, but you want to sell as many ahead of time as you can.

The most fickle is walk up. If it’s a Saturday and someone says, “Let’s go the Chiefs game,” and someone else says, “Wait a minute. The Zags are on TV. The Cougars are on TV. It just started to snow out,” that’s the guy you don’t want to rely on. 

Groups are a big part of our business too.

What is the scope of your holdings? And is it the same partners?

BB: It’s pretty much the same people. In Spokane, we’re involved with the Indians and Chiefs. In California, we own the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes. That’s long-season single A. We’re a Dodgers affiliate. It’s a very good franchise. 

The main business I’ve always been in is the apartment business. My partner down there was my high school basketball coach, Cliff  Warren. We’ve been partners since I was 24. We have a few other outside partners, but it’s pretty much just Cliff and the Bretts. He manages all of the apartments, and he’s a minority owner on all of the teams. 

Also, with the (Fritz) Wolff family, I’ve done some real estate, some apartment building with them in Spokane. We’ve built a couple of properties and bought some existing properties. I’ve become very close with the Wolff family. 

Recently, in the last couple of years, with Chris Batten of RenCorp., we bought some downtown properties, and we have some partners on those. And those have been fun. In any great city, you have to have a vibrant downtown. We bought some of these older properties and are bringing them back to life—and it’s really satisfying. 

Didn’t you also own the Tri-Cities team?

BB: We own the Tri-Cities team, but they have a rule about dual ownership, so that is George’s team. A lot of the Brett Sports people that I’ve hired are running that but we have to run them as separate operations. 

And do you operate Brett Bros. Bats?

BB: The bat company, yes. We still own that.

Let’s talk player staffing. How does that work with the teams?

BB: In baseball, you have an affiliation. Our affiliation is with the Texas Rangers, and they pay the salaries of the players and the coaches. They own those players and coaches. We can have a great player in Spokane for three weeks, and all of a sudden, they decide they’re moving him up. That’s the way the system works there. 

In hockey, we’re major-junior hockey. What we do is draft players at 14 and they can play in our league at 16. When we draft those players and bring them into Spokane, we have expenses to bring them in. They all live with a family, and they get a stipend on a monthly basis. If they end up not signing a professional contract, they get one year of tuition, books, or fees in their state or province paid for by us. We have a Spokane Chiefs education fund that we set aside for that guy who doesn’t turn out to be the next Tyler Johnson (former Chief who is playing for the Tampa Bay Lightning). It’s a really nice system.

How closely is profitability tied to winning in minor league sports?

BB: Winning always helps, in hockey more so because at the end of the year, if you play no playoffs games, you don’t have any of that revenue. If you play 10 homes games in the playoffs, it means you’re winning. In hockey, it’s important to win.

In baseball, it’s not quite as important. I always say in baseball, if you can hang around .500, you should be fine. You can get some incremental revenue if you’re in a pennant race at the end of the year with people coming out to the park. If you’re in a pennant race at the end of the year, you’ll find yourself on the front page of the sports section a little bit more. If you have a bad team, you’re relegated to page 3 or 4. But there’s not that much of a difference. 

A lot of our season is the pre-sale—the season ticket, the mini-season ticket, the groups—those typically are booked months in advance. We haven’t played a game yet, and they’re already sold, which is good.

Do you regret not pursuing arena football?

BB: Well, not really. The Spokane Shock have done well, and we support them. We think they’ve done great for the community. 

But there’s only so much you can do. When I get involved with something, I’m all in. Being involved with the Indians and Chiefs in town here, then I go see my brother in Kansas City. I like to go to spring training. I see enough games.

When that opportunity was presented to us a few years back, I just thought, I don’t need another something to do, because these things take the same amount of time. They’re all full-time gigs. We think the Shock have been good for Spokane. They’ve been good for the arena.