Kwanza Jones Just Became MLB’s First Black Woman Majority Owner In A Record $3.9 Billion Deal

Kwanza Jones is now a majority owner of the San Diego Padres, making her the first Black woman to hold that position in Major League Baseball history. MLB owners unanimously approved the ownership group led by Jones and her husband, investor José E. Feliciano, on August 17, in a deal valuing the franchise at $3.9 billion.

 

That is the highest price ever paid for a Major League Baseball team. Their group owns more than 40 percent of the franchise, with Feliciano serving as the designated control person, the executive MLB holds accountable for the club. Feliciano, born in Puerto Rico, becomes the league’s first Puerto Rican majority owner. The sale officially closes in the coming weeks.

 

They were introduced Monday at Petco Park. The room was full, the speakers came on, and the music that played was a song Jones wrote and recorded herself, with parts of it inspired by Fernando Tatis Jr. robbing a home run in New York last week. The chorus goes: you know we’re all in, and we’re gonna win.
Then she walked in.

 

She did not open with a spreadsheet. She did not open with a five-year plan. She opened with a song she made about the team she had just bought, and then told the room they were all in, and it was not lip service. Both owners picked jersey numbers with meaning. Feliciano took 21 for Roberto Clemente. Jones took double zero. She said she could have gone with one, as in we’re number one, but she chose 00 because there are zero limits and infinite possibilities.
Now, about how she got here.

 

Jones is from Los Angeles and graduated from Princeton in 1993, where she was also a Division I athlete. While she was still an undergrad, she entered Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and won it, singing Jennifer Holliday’s “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” That building was already in her life. Her father had a law office and an employment agency near the Apollo and brought her there as a child. She later joined the Apollo’s board of directors.

 

She was crowned Miss Baltimore in 1995 and finished as first runner-up for Miss Maryland. She built a career as a recording artist, then as an investor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. She and Feliciano gave $20 million to Princeton, and the university named Kwanza Jones Hall and José E. Feliciano Hall after them.

 

Before they made an offer, Padres president Erik Greupner had them out at the spring training facility in Peoria, Arizona, and put Feliciano in the batting cage on the Traject pitching machine, set to simulate Mason Miller, the team’s closer who throws 100. It took four pitches before Feliciano nubbed a changeup back at the machine for a bloop single. The pitch was somewhere around 90. They made an offer after that, and in the second round of bidding in May it landed at the record number.

 

They take over from the Seidler family, which put the team up for sale in November, two years after Peter Seidler died. Seidler spent aggressively on players and built deep charitable ties in San Diego, so the question every Padres fan has is whether the payroll holds. Feliciano said the team will need to live within its means but indicated there are no plans to lower payroll, adding that the city supports them in a way that lets them invest back into the team, the stadium, and San Diego itself. He invoked Seidler directly, saying they want to continue that legacy of dreaming big and doing the impossible, because the impossible becomes possible when somebody does it.

 

Jones was blunter. She said they are competitive, that you do not get to do what they do unless you are competitive, and that they want to win. She said she hopes it is sooner rather than later.
The couple already runs the Kwanza Jones and José E. Feliciano Initiative, and both signaled they intend to build on the Padres Foundation’s existing work across San Diego and the Baja communities rather than replace it. Feliciano put it plainly, saying sports is more than a business, and the Padres are one of the pillars of the city.

 

Six ownership groups have owned the franchise since it was founded in 1969. This is the sixth, and the first one that looks like this.