Mark Walter may be the most hands-off control person in baseball, and that’s exactly how the Dodgers seem to like it.
As the majority stakeholder in Guggenheim Baseball Management, Walter sits at the top of the ownership structure for the club that was bought out of bankruptcy in March 2012. He’s around plenty - a regular face in the owners’ box at Dodger Stadium and someone who often stops by the batting cage to mingle with executives, coaches and players before games - but the real work of running the team happens somewhere else.
That division of labor came through clearly in a new interview Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten did with Sports Business Radio. Kasten described Walter’s role in blunt, simple terms.
"It's one vote. Even in this case, no one else [in the ownership group] has a vote.
It's Mark Walter, and Mark Walter delegates everything to me, and through me to the rest of the organization. I will go weeks or even months without hearing from Mark because he is doing bigger and more important things than us."
Walter’s reach goes far beyond the Dodgers. His business empire is sprawling, and his success managing that wide sports portfolio earned him Sports Business Journal’s Executive of the Year award in 2026.
Along with the Dodgers, Walter’s sports holdings include the Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Sparks, Chelsea F.C., the Professional Women's Hockey League and stakes in Formula One, NASCAR and Indycar. His TWG Global website also lists financial services, insurance, artificial intelligence and merchant banking among its other areas.
Kasten said the arrangement has worked smoothly because Walter is invested in all of it.
"He loves this team," Kasten said of Walter. "He loves all the teams that we own. And so it has not been a challenge."
Kasten also pointed to several of the Dodgers’ minority owners, including Magic Johnson and tennis legend Billie Jean King. King and her partner, Ilona Kloss, are even more frequent in-person spectators at Dodger Stadium than Walter.
Still, when it comes to the actual running of the franchise, Walter is the one at the top. And by choice, he leaves the day-to-day steering to Kasten, whose sports business career spans 50 years.
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