2023 Minor League Executive Of The Year: Wisconsin Timber Rattlers’ Rob Zerjav

Image credit: Rob Zerjav (Photo courtesy of Wisconsin Timber Rattlers)

The Wisconsin Timber Rattlers had a banner year in 2023. 

Attendance was up 10%. The club’s stadium naming rights deal with the Neuroscience Group was extended for 10 more years. Naming rights for club suites were also extended.

Wisconsin’s stadium is renovated and fully compliant with the stricter rules of the Professional Development License standards. And the Timber Rattlers’ front office staff of 30 is an excellent mix of lifers—13 employees have been with the team for at least 10 years—and new energy.

All of that seems truly amazing if you rewind to where the Appleton, Wis., club was in 2020.

At that point, the Timber Rattlers were community-owned. That had worked well, but community ownership wasn’t designed to handle a pandemic year without baseball and without revenues coming in. So the team needed new ownership. The stadium was owned separately.

And with MLB taking over the operation of the minor leagues and cutting the number of affiliated ticket-selling teams from 160 to 120, all of that uncertainty was arriving at the very moment when the Timber Rattlers were in a beauty pageant to prove they were a team worth keeping in affiliated baseball. 

One wrong step and the team could find itself out of affiliated ball.

But the Timber Rattlers did have some advantages. Craig Dickman, a locally-based one-time member of the volunteer board that runs the team, had interest in buying the team and the stadium. And Dickman was working with Timber Rattlers’ president Rob Zerjav.

So instead of having to find and then develop trust in an outside group to purchase the team, there was a potential ownership group with long-time ties to the team. In Zerjav’s case, he’d been working for the Timber Rattlers for 24 years at that point.

And when it came to having ties with an MLB club that wanted to partner with the team, the Timber Rattlers not only had an excellent relationship with the Brewers, but they also served as the team’s alternate training site in 2020.

The purchases were made. Zerjav became the managing partner and CEO to add to his title of president. And Wisconsin landed a PDL as part of the 120-team reorganized minor leagues. They remained in the Midwest League, which moved up in classification from Low-A to High-A.

“A lot of dominos had to fall in the right order in such a quick amount of time, and they did,” Zerjav said. “It was relieving to have that domino fall and this one fall. It’s been everything we could have hoped for.”

As the head of a team that has consistently been an excellent operation, Zerjav is the 2023 BA Minor League Executive of the Year.

“I got to become an owner of an MiLB team. I never in a million years thought that would happen,” Zerjav said. “To be able to keep our full-time staff intact and compensated and take care of them and their families, that was important. Then it was all about, ‘How do we save baseball in Appleton?‘”

On his first day as an intern for the club in 1997, Zerjav never imagined he was starting what has proven to be his workplace home for more than a quarter of a century. But much like everything that had to fall in place for affiliated baseball to survive in Appleton, Zerjav’s career has seen domino after domino fall in the right order.

“Never did I think I’d just stay here,” Zerjav said. “(Working in the minor leagues) is nomadic. Maybe it was God saying, ‘This is your spot.’ Every time I was ready to move on, something opened up here. It was ticket sales. Then it was stadium operations. The GM job opened up when I was 27.”

Zerjav has managed to fulfill his dream of working in minor league baseball without having to go far from his roots. He describes himself as a baseball fan who grew up in the football town of Green Bay. Within two weeks of interning with the Rattlers, he knew he wanted to work in baseball.

And now, he’s part of ensuring that others get that opportunity as well.

“Treat people like you want to be treated,” he said. “That’s one of the core values we have with the Timber Rattlers. We try to take care of people. 

“We didn’t lay staff off during the pandemic. We kept everyone whole. That’s the way we try to do business here. We have a great group of people here who continue to grow, and it’s even better now.”