August 21, 2026
Why I Started SJM Sports
I grew up around the game before I ever thought about the business of it. Baseball was where I learned to compete, to fail in front of people and get back up, and to appreciate how much work happens behind a single at-bat that nobody in the stands ever sees. Playing the game gave me the eye — for talent, for effort, for the intangibles that don’t show up in a box score. But it was moving to the other side of the fence that taught me the rest of it.
My career took me from player representation at Turner-Gary Sports, to the front office of the New York Mets, to Complete Game Institute, and eventually into a decade-plus run with the Detroit Tigers, where I served as Vice President and Assistant General Manager. In that seat, I wasn’t just evaluating players — I was negotiating contracts, running salary arbitration cases, building out performance infrastructure, and overseeing more than $100 million in capital investment across academies, training facilities, and stadium upgrades. I sat in draft rooms and in boardrooms in the same week.
That combination — having played the game, scouted it, negotiated it, and financed it — is rare. Most people in sports live on one side of that line: the baseball side or the business side. Front offices and agencies operate the daily life of the sport; investors and operators sit a level above it, trying to underwrite decisions about people, facilities, and organizations they’ve often never actually run. I’ve spent my career on both sides, and I started to see how much value gets left on the table when those two worlds don’t talk to each other.
That’s why I started SJM Sports. Investors looking at opportunities in the sports ecosystem — a youth academy, a performance facility, a stake in a team or agency — need more than financial diligence. They need someone who has actually run a scouting department, sat through an arbitration hearing, and signed off on a capital budget for a new training complex, and who can tell them what’s really driving value and what’s just noise. That’s the lens SJM Sports brings: real operating experience, applied to real investment decisions.
I built this firm because I kept seeing the same gap — smart capital chasing sports opportunities without anyone in the room who has actually done the job on the ground. My goal with SJM Sports is to close that gap: to help investors evaluate and grow opportunities across the sports industry with the same rigor and instinct I built over 15 years of doing the work myself, from the field to the front office.
— Sam