Milk & Honey expands executive roster with baseball division led by industry veteran Kyle Thousand

In a move that signals further integration of sports and athletes across the broader spectrum of entertainment, management company Milk & Honey Musica + Sport + Venture he’s branching out into his next field of opportunity: baseball.

Milk & Honey Baseball will be managed by industry veteran Kyle Thousand, who previously served as Roc Nation Sports’ first chief executive officer of baseball. It debuted two years after the company entered the sports arena with a football agency which now has 18 NFL athletes including Courtland Sutton (Denver Broncos), Damien Wilson (Carolina Panthers) and Damiere Byrd (Atlanta Falcons).

Thousand will work alongside current Milk & Honey Sports partners Jake Presser, Rawleigh Williams, Dave Frank and Alex Harrow. The baseball division is based in Nashville and launched in partnership with Holdings of large plansa diversified family holding company with investments in cannabis, real estate, entertainment and hospitality.

“We have been discussing expanding into other sports ever since we opened the soccer division of Milk & Honey. Today we demonstrate our swift commitment to opening baseball as another exciting chapter of Milk & Honey Sports and the company’s firm goal to become a larger entertainment company beyond music,” says Lucas Keller, who founded Milk & Honey Honey in 2014 and has expanded his roster to include songwriters, producers, DJs and artists behind hits for the likes of Justin Bieber, Megan Thee Stallion, Chloe, Doja Cat, Drake and Post Malone, and across A&R, media and TV licensing and cinematic.

“Kyle is a great addition to our Milk & Honey sports division, and baseball is a world we’re excited to enter,” says Presser, who heads the sports division. Milk & Honey’s first baseball signees will be announced just after the new year.

While at Roc Nation, Thousand oversaw the division representing players including CC Sabathia, Robinson Cano and Yoenis Cespedes. Worked with Cespedes during left fielder free agency negotiations with the New York Mets, presenting the Mets with advanced metrics to measure how much Cespedes was worth to the team in ticket, media, merchandising and sponsorship revenue to seal a deal that guaranteed to more to Cespedes than $137.5 million over five years.

“I am thrilled to be joining the Milk & Honey family,” says Thousand. “It became evident that we shared the same vision to create a truly unique boutique baseball division focused on providing clients with elite service, negotiating unmatched contracts, and helping clients maximize their opportunities in baseball both on and off the field”.

Off the field, Milk & Honey plans to continue to leverage its immersion in the full spectrum of entertainment to support athletes in the same way it has embraced Web3 initiatives. The company represented the inauguration Web3 incursion of the family of the legendary artist Pablo Picasso in a campaign that synthesized digital art, music and a physical piece of Picasso’s art.

“One of the big goals for the company next year is integrating music and sports,” Keller says. “They are closer companies than I think he realizes. There is great interest among athletes and artists, even in terms of friendship and camaraderie. I find a lot of our artists are friends with athletes and a lot of the athletes we work with want to make music.”

Brands are also increasingly breaking out of vertical silos to create more unified activations, he adds.

“A lot of the brand relationships that we have and a lot of the ideas that we have when it comes to content, we’re just integrating into Hollywood. There are many similar relationships where someone wants to do something that is necessarily a deal with a traditional brand.”