Who owns the Seattle Mariners? John Stanton, explained

John W. Stanton has controlled the Seattle Mariners since August 19, 2016, when he became the designated control person and president of First Avenue Entertainment LLLP, a partnership of roughly 17 local investors with no single majority owner. The structure is deliberate: Stanton runs the club as CEO and control person, but the ownership is spread across a consortium rather than concentrated in one person’s hands. This model has been in place for a decade.

🏟️ Ownership at a glance

Principal owner	John W. Stanton
Controlling group	First Avenue Entertainment LLLP
Current group since	2016
Purchase price	$661M
Latest valuation	$2.35B
Owner’s net worth	$2.4B
Value multiple	3.6× the purchase price

Who is John Stanton

Stanton’s fortune is self-made and rooted in cellular telecommunications. He was a key executive at McCaw Cellular, founded Western Wireless in 1994, and built VoiceStream Wireless—which became T-Mobile USA after Deutsche Telekom acquired it. In 2006 he established Trilogy Equity Partners, a venture capital firm based in Bellevue, Washington, where he serves as managing director. As of July 2026, Forbes valued his personal net worth at $2.4 billion, ranking him 1755 on the global billionaires list. He is 70 years old, a Whitman College graduate with an MBA from Harvard, and has lived in the Seattle area his entire life except during college.

Stanton led the investment group that acquired majority control of the Mariners from Nintendo in 2016 for $661 million. Nintendo retained a 10% stake and remains a minority partner today. The original consortium included Chris Larson (a former Microsoft executive and the group’s largest individual historical investor), John Ellis, Buck Ferguson, Howard Lincoln, Jeff Raikes, and Frank Shrontz. In May 2025, Panos Panay—a former Microsoft executive and senior vice president at Amazon—and Mary Panay joined as limited partners.

How they bought the team

Stanton’s group bought the Mariners from Nintendo for $661 million in 2016, implicitly valuing the club at an undisclosed sum. Nintendo had owned the team since 1992, when Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo’s chairman, personally contributed $75 million of the $125 million purchase price to keep the franchise in Seattle. Before that, the club changed hands multiple times: George Argyros acquired it in 1981 for $13.1 million; Jeff Smulyan and Emmis Broadcasting took over in 1989 for $76 million; and the original ownership group—which included actor Danny Kaye—received the expansion franchise in 1976 for $6.5 million.

Year	Buyer	Amount
1976	Kaye-Smith Group (Danny Kaye, Lester Smith, Stanley Golub, Walter Schoenfeld, James Stillwell Jr., James A. Walsh): expansion franchise	$7M
1981	George Argyros (90% for an undisclosed sum and then the remaining 10% for an undisclosed sum)	$13M
1989	Jeff Smulyan and Emmis Broadcasting (Emmis 50%, Morgan Stanley 25%, Smulyan 15%, Michael Browning 10%)	$76M
1992	Nintendo of America / The Baseball Club of Seattle LP. Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo president, personally contributed 75 of the 125 million. Purchase driven to prevent the team from leaving Seattle.	$125M
2016	First Avenue Entertainment LLLP, headed by John Stanton, buys the majority from Nintendo. Nintendo keeps 10%. Implicit valuation of the club: an undisclosed sum.	$661M

What else they own

Beyond the Mariners, Stanton controls Trilogy Equity Partners and Trilogy International Partners, a telecommunications investment firm. He founded Western Wireless and VoiceStream Wireless, maintains positions in Microsoft and Costco Wholesale, and has served on numerous corporate boards and philanthropic initiatives across the Pacific Northwest. The Mariners themselves operate a player development academy in the Dominican Republic and have built their talent pipeline heavily through international scouting—a strategy that has defined the franchise under Stanton’s leadership.

Where the games air

In a dramatic shift at the end of 2025, the Mariners closed ROOT Sports Northwest, their own regional sports network that had operated for nearly four decades. The club had acquired the remaining 29% stake in ROOT from Warner Bros. Discovery in December 2023 to own it outright, then shut it down two years later. Games now stream through Mariners.TV at $19.99 per month or $99.99 per season, with additional broadcasts on linear television through MLB Local Media, which produces and distributes the local product. The broadcast team remained largely intact, though the revenue model pays roughly half what the previous RSN contract did.

Facts worth knowing

In 1992 Nintendo bought the Mariners for $125 million and Hiroshi Yamauchi put $75 million from his own pocket; the deal was structured to prevent the franchise from moving out of Seattle.
When Nintendo sold in 2016 for $661 million, it kept 10%: the Mario company remains a partner of an MLB team in 2026.
The Stanton group was deliberately structured without a majority owner: there are about 17 local investors and Stanton commands as designated control person, not as owner of the majority of shares.
The Mariners bought 100% of their own ROOT Sports Northwest network in December 2023 and closed it two years later, at the end of 2025, to hand over broadcasts to MLB.
From $13.1 million that the entire team cost in 1981 to $2,350 million Forbes valuation in 2026.
The first ownership group, in 1976, included actor and comedian Danny Kaye.

Where they stand among the 30 owners

List	Rank
By franchise value	#16 de 30
By purchase price	#10 de 27
By owner’s net worth	#16 de 21
By years in charge	#24 de 30

Amounts are nominal and not adjusted for inflation: comparing a decades-old purchase price with today’s valuation overstates the real gain.

The Mariners rank 16th among the 30 MLB franchises by current valuation and 24th by tenure of ownership, having been under Stanton’s control for a decade. The club is worth $2.35 billion as of March 2026, a trajectory that reflects the broader expansion of baseball’s economic value—from $13.1 million in 1981 to today’s figure. The ownership model remains unusual in baseball: a consortium of local investors with a designated control person rather than a majority shareholder, a structure that has allowed Stanton to lead without owning the majority of the team.