Milk & Honey Expands Management Roster With Baseball Division Led By Industry Vet Kyle Thousand

In a move that signals the further integration of sports and athletes across the broader entertainment spectrum, management firm Milk & Honey Music + Sports + Ventures is expanding into its next field of opportunity—baseball.

Milk & Honey Baseball will be run by industry veteran Kyle Thousand, who previously served as Roc Nation Sports’ first-ever managing director of baseball. It debuts two years after the company entered the sports arena with a football agency that now counts 18 NFL athletes including Courtland Sutton (Denver Broncos), Damien Wilson (Carolina Panthers) and Damiere Byrd (Atlanta Falcons).

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

“We’ve been discussing expansion into other sports ever since we opened Milk & Honey’s football division. Today, we show our fast commitment to opening baseball as another exciting chapter in Milk & Honey Sports, and the company’s steadfast goal of becoming a broader entertainment company beyond music,” says Lucas Keller, who founded Milk & Honey in 2014 and has grown its 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 and film licensing.

“Kyle is a great addition to our sports division at Milk & Honey and baseball is a world we are excited to jump into,” 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. He worked with Cespedes during the left fielder’s 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, merchandise and sponsorship revenue to seal a deal that guaranteed Cespedes more than $137.5 million over five years.

“I’m thrilled to be joining the Milk & Honey family,” Thousand says. “It became apparent that we shared the same vision to create a truly unique, boutique baseball division that is focused on providing clients with elite servicing, unparalleled contract negotiation and helping clients maximize their opportunity in baseball both on and off the field.”

Off the field, Milk & Honey plans to continue leveraging its immersion across the entertainment gamut to support athletes in the same way it has embraced Web3 ventures. The company represented the inaugural Web3 foray of the family of legendary artist Pablo Picasso in a campaign that synthesized digital art, music and a physical piece of Picasso art.

“One of the big focuses for the company next year is integrating music and sports,” Keller says. “They are closer businesses than I think people realize. There is a big interest between athletes and artists, just even on a friendship and camaraderie level. I find that a lot of our artists are friends with athletes and a lot of athletes we work with want to make music.”

Brands, too, are increasingly stepping outside of silo’d verticals to create more unified activations, he adds.

“A lot of the brand relationships that we have and a lot of the ideas we have when it comes to content—we are just integrating them into Hollywood. It’s a lot of similar relationships where somebody wants to do something that’s necessarily a traditional brand deal.”