Dodgers Hire Caroline Perry From Padres, Now Hold Three of MLB's Female COO Slots

The Los Angeles Dodgers hired Caroline Perry from the San Diego Padres front office, announced Tuesday, preserving their concentration of three female chief operating officers across Major League Baseball—a number no other club approaches. Perry joins Tucker Kain and Naomi Checks in the Dodger Stadium C-suite, a roster depth that functions less as diversity theater and more as structural advantage when sponsor negotiations run parallel, arena developments need separate liaisons, and one executive is already committed to a league committee.

Perry spent four years with the Padres, most recently overseeing partnership revenue and stadium operations—the dual portfolio that teaches an operator how $400M in annual sponsorship intersects with gate flow, premium seating yield, and the timing of a ballpark's second-phase renovation. San Diego invested heavily in Petco Park upgrades and chased Dodger-level sponsorship rates without Dodger-level attendance floors; Perry now arrives at an organization where 47,000 season-ticket equivalents and a pending local broadcast restructure create different problems. The Padres announced no immediate replacement, which means someone already carrying two portfolios now carries three until after the winter meetings.

The hire matters because the Dodgers are structuring their front office for the post-RSN revenue model while simultaneously expanding their real estate footprint around Dodger Stadium. Kain runs business operations and the stadium development entity. Checks handles marketing, content, and the partnership stack that now includes 16 naming-rights and category-exclusive deals after the club added a helmet sponsor in April. Perry's portfolio—likely partnerships and premium experience, based on her Padres remit—slots into a system where each COO owns a $150M-plus annual revenue stream and operates with limited overlap. The model works when compensation is structured around total organizational revenue growth, not just division performance, which the Dodgers quietly shifted to in 2023 after Kain's promotion.

This is also a poaching story. The Padres and Dodgers share a division, a luxury tax bracket, and a shrinking pool of executives who have actually managed nine-figure sponsorship renewals in a collapsing cable environment. Perry's exit arrives six months before the Padres' $85M annual Sycuan Casino partnership enters its renewal window—a negotiation that typically takes 18-24 months and relies on institutional knowledge Perry built. The timing is unsubtle. Los Angeles needed someone who has already navigated a major partnership renewal in a Western market with tech money, crypto skepticism, and Asian-diaspora fan demographics. San Diego just lost that person to a division rival that can pay 20-30% above market and offer equity-like upside if the team sells a minority stake, which remains possible after Guggenheim Baseball's $8.5B valuation in private secondary trades last spring.

MLB's broader executive gender composition remains stalled. The league counts six female chief operating officers across 30 clubs, three of them in Los Angeles. No other franchise employs more than one. The concentration reveals less about the Dodgers' values and more about their structural design: they run a multi-COO model that distributes the traditional team-president workload across specialized operators, which makes room for more executives at the top level and reduces the penalty for hiring someone without the traditional path through ticket sales and corporate sponsorships. It also creates redundancy when one COO departs, which matters to ownership groups that hate transition risk. The Yankees, Mets, and Cubs all explored similar structures in the past 18 months, but none have implemented them, mostly because their current presidents view shared authority as a demotion.

Watch for the Padres' response hire in the next 90 days, likely someone poached from the Giants, Diamondbacks, or a tech-adjacent property. Los Angeles will assign Perry's specific remit after their December planning meetings, once the organization knows whether it will bid for a second All-Star Game in the next five-year cycle, which would require a dedicated executive and a stadium-ops overhaul Perry's résumé fits. The Dodgers also enter the offseason needing to extend Shohei Ohtani's commercial partnerships before his endorsement portfolio opens to renegotiation in 2026, a process that requires someone who understands how a $700M contract changes what a brand will pay for signage.

Perry starts in late November, which gives her three weeks before the winter meetings and four months before pitchers and catchers. The Padres, meanwhile, just entered the offseason short one person who knew which sponsors were already negotiating quietly and which were waiting to see who else leaves.