Marti Wronski JD’97 didn’t come to the Wisconsin Law School planning to plan a World Series celebration. But her time on campus put her on a path to the Major League Baseball’s biggest stage.
Wronski is the chief operating officer for the Milwaukee Brewers, a role she’s held since December 2022. She’s responsible for much of the team’s business infrastructure functions: legal services, HR, administrative management, marketing, and fan experience. It’s a job that extends far beyond her legal training.
“Wisconsin helped me develop critical thinking,” she says. “After my UW education, I went to work at Foley and Lardner, a Wisconsin law firm. Foley taught me corporate litigation, but the UW taught me how to think.”
Fan experience has been a particular focus in the fall of 2026, as the Brewers raced through the playoffs and won the World Series for the first time in the franchise’s 58-year history.
The team began life as the Seattle Pilots in 1969 before Bud Selig ’56 bought the franchise, moved it to Milwaukee, and renamed it the Brewers in 1970. It then took the team 12 years to win its first pennant, a season that went from triumph to heartbreak when the Brewers lost the 1982 World Series. It took the franchise another quarter century to get back to post-season play and nearly 20 more years to return to the World Series.
“We’ve been seen as an underdog for a long time, and now we’ve gotten all the way to the top,” Wronski says. She joined the club during that long dry spell, first as general counsel in 2003, then vice president for administration in 2017 before being named COO. She’s well aware of the team’s history, and during the championship run, she says, she worked with team owner Mark Attanasio and Rick Schelsinger ’83, president of business operations, to ensure that fans who had waited impatiently all those years received a reward.
“We understand what this means to Wisconsin,” she says. “I was 10 and living in Neenah during the 1982 run. We understand the history and how important this is.”
When the Brewers completed their championship run in Tampa, Florida, on October 28, Wronski and her colleagues quickly executed plans for a victory parade in Milwaukee two days later so that the entire community could take part in the celebration.
“We often quote Bud Selig,” Wronski says. “We keep a line of his hanging in our building: ‘Baseball is a social institution.’ Our staff passes it three, five, 10 times a day. It’s a reminder that we’re just a small part of this legacy and that everything we do is meant to bring people together.”
