Pirates Hire NBA Veteran Drew Cloud

The Pittsburgh Pirates have brought  a Pittsburgh native home to fill an important position that has been vacant for some time now.   The Bucs announced the hiring of Drew Cloud as Executive Vice President/Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. Cloud will be responsible for the Pirates’ ticket sales, corporate partnerships and marketing efforts.

With the sales efforts going strong, look for Cloud to work at improving the Pirates marketing efforts and to make some tweaks to the sales efforts of the ball club.    Cloud will replace Lou DePaoli, who departed for the Mets way back in July.  DePaoli came to the Bucs via a putrid Atlanta Hawks franchise.

Cloud brings almost 20 years of experience and continues to follow the trend that Pirates executives come from the National Basketball Association.  His most recent position was Vice President, Team Marketing and Business Operations for the NBA in New York City. While with the NBA, Cloud consulted on a day-to-day basis with a number of NBA franchises on all aspects of business operations.

Prior to joining the NBA, Cloud was VP at MSG Sports where he led all ticket sales, service and retention for the New York Knicks, New York Rangers and New York Liberty.  Cloud spoke on various sports panels where he stressed the importance of recognizing the efforts of sales teams.  Cloud has plenty of work to do in that regard for the Pirates.

Prior to that position he had been with the Phoenix Suns and Mercury for seven years.  During that time, he was interviewed by the Post Gazette and here is the link to that Q&A .   We think you will get a kick out of the first question asked of Cloud, which was, ‘Whats Up With The Gorilla?’

Before joining the Suns, Cloud spent seven years in Tampa, Florida, including actually working in baseball for three seasons with the Tampa Bay Rays.

"“Drew Cloud is an extremely bright and innovative executive with broad and varied experience in professional sports,” said Frank Coonelly, Pirates President. “As a Pittsburgh native, we are fortunate to be able to add Drew to our team at this very exciting time for the Pirates organization.”"

If you would like to follow Cloud on Twitter, here you go.

Official release