A Seattle Sports Fan At Heart And In Stadium Lights

Kraken senior payroll analyst Wes Brown quite literally has his fingers on the pulse of Seattle sports fans.

When not crunching numbers at the team’s Kraken Community Iceplex headquarters, Brown, who turns 50 in May, can be found revving up Lumen Field crowds at Seahawks and Sounders games. The Mount Baker native, raised in the shadow of Franklin High School, has done 15 years of contract work with a company handling the NFL stadium’s LED signage operations and gets paid to help keep in-game atmosphere charged up.

“Things like, ‘Get loud!’ and ‘Make some noise!’ and ‘Touchdown!’ – I’m controlling it,” Brown said. “Some of the stuff, they’ll call for. The director and producers will be, ‘OK, let’s get them riled up!’ But I just kind of know. I’m a sports fan, too.”

Indeed, Brown grew up playing neighborhood pickup basketball with friends and still does to this day. He also played youth soccer and then junior varsity baseball in high school and became a Detroit Red Wings fan while playing NHL ’93 on his Sega Genesis video game console.

His hockey fandom was admittedly casual at first, restricted to mainly watching playoffs on TV given there was no local NHL team. But now, the opportunity to work for the Kraken has rekindled his love for that sport as well.

“It just seems to fit,” he said.

His manager, Renea Coward, handles Kraken player payroll while Brown takes on much of that duty for the team’s office staff. He’ll also handle taxation compliance issues that come up as laws change, such as new federal regulations on declaring gratuities for staffers at the team’s 32 Bar & Grill restaurant.

“It’s so that when people go and do their taxes, they don’t say, ‘Hey, what’s this?’” Brown said.

Brown’s knowledge of restaurants and accounting is what got him hired by the Kraken just ahead of their debut 2021-22 season. He’d worked nearly two decades for AT&T Mobility upon graduating with a political science degree from Western Washington University, moving through the ranks from customer service into their payroll department.

The company laid him off in 2019, after which Brown was approached to do accounting work for a firm specializing in restaurants.

“I was in over my head,” he said with a chuckle. “That job was very tough.”

But it served him well just more than a year later when the Kraken, not yet playing any games, were planning to open their Community Iceplex and 32 Bar & Grill.

“The finance team didn’t have anybody that had restaurant experience,” Brown said. “So, I was like, ‘Sweet!’”

And Brown still has time for continued side gigs with other local teams, borne from his longstanding love of basketball. He’d attended a Seattle Supersonics NBA game at what’s now Climate Pledge Arena and couldn’t believe it when he spotted a friend sitting in much better courtside seats than his own location. The friend later told Brown it was because he was working the arena’s signage operations.

“I was like, ‘How do I get a job like that?’”

Brown was soon courtside doing the same work.

Back then, the signage was mostly manual but gradually became more LED based as technology changed. Besides NBA, he also worked Mariners games, initially sitting in a dugout level location near the camera well and darting across the field to change the manual signage behind home plate.

Brown kept doing Mariners work until a few years ago when the team began contracting with a different company. But Brown wanted to keep hanging around the sport, so he reached out to a Major League Baseball contact who helped get him one of his most unusual – and challenging – side jobs yet. This one somewhat indirectly involved “signage’’ but not the type Brown was used to.

In the wake of the 2017 Houston Astros sign stealing scandal – when players were found to have used in-game spying and communication tactics to literally steal opponents’ on field signs – Major League Baseball toughened enforcement rules designed to prevent cheating. Brown became one of the MLB compliance officers stationed at ballparks nationwide.

One of his main jobs was entering the Mariners dugout and bullpen twice per game to ensure the catcher was wearing his pitcher communication device – a transmitter used to send pre-pitch signals to a receiver worn by the pitcher – in the right place on his knee pad and not somewhere else to communicate illicitly. Wireless communication typically isn’t allowed during games – to prevent cheating by teams -- but the relatively new technology was implemented after the Astros scandal in part to lessen the chance of opponents stealing manual catcher finger signs previously made to the pitcher.

In that same spirit of preventing illicit communication for cheating purposes, Brown also had to ensure players adhered to MLB’s longstanding ban on cellphone usage during games. Players don’t always respect the rule, usually more out of boredom than any organized attempt to cheat.

“So, a lot of times during the games the dudes are trying to sneak it,” Brown said of players glancing at their phones. “And you’d catch them and you’d have to tell them specifically, ‘Hey, this is your verbal warning.’”

Brown said most players understood his role, though a couple would give him attitude. From there, he’d mention any warnings issued in his nightly report and let MLB take care of any follow-up.

That gig last two years but he stopped doing it ahead of last season because he found he wasn’t enjoying it as much as ongoing LED work. At first, he was disappointed to have missed out on a firsthand look at the Mariners’ run last season to Game 7 of the American League Championship Series.

But Brown quickly exorcised much of that through his ongoing LED operations job the past NFL season as the Seahawks captured their second Super Bowl title.

Brown was right there through all of it. Once he’s done posting required sponsorship advertisements at Lumen Field in a pre-designated “loop” during the game, he’ll start prioritizing what’s happening on the field. He looks for “cues” such as the stadium DJ pausing between music sets.

“I’ll be like, ‘OK, this is the play,’” Brown said. “The offense is out on the field, they’re in the huddle and we want the fans to get excited. You just understand the moment.”

Those moments came fast and furious during last month’s NFC Championship Game against the Los Angeles Rams, Brown was at his post adjacent the stadium press box.

“I just know what to do when it’s needed,” he said. “Sometimes, you don’t want the fans to get too riled up. There was a point where it was a big defensive play coming up and (Seahawks head coach) Mike MacDonald called a timeout so you can see him talking to the defense, so it’s like, ‘OK, let’s not push this now. Let’s give them a chance to breathe.’ And then, when they’re done talking, we don’t care about the (opposing) offense, so now it’s time to get the fans riled up again.”

Brown is also excited about the Kraken, in third place in the Pacific Division and seeking their second playoff appearance. And not just the on-ice product, but the office he works within.

“Honestly, it is good to see a diversified group of people here,” said Brown, who identifies as African American. “There was something about hockey initially where it just seemed there were a lot of white guys playing the sport. And that’s fine. I don’t have a problem with it. But yeah, I do appreciate the diversity around here.

“I also hear (Kraken radio play-by-play man) Everett Fitzhugh say this too, that it’s nice to see people that look like him around the office. It’s not just him. I feel like the Kraken are trying to do the right thing, for the most part, with everything they do with their values. It helps to work for a company like that.”

Brown will point that diversity part out to others as he tries to get them revved up about the Kraken the same way he excites them about Seahawks and Sounders action on gameday.

“I’ll try to convince some of my family members to get tickets and they’ll be like, ‘Nah, not for me,’” he said of Kraken games. “And I’m like, ‘You’d be surprised.’”

For now, he’ll simply keep trying to press the right fandom buttons – whether inside a stadium or outside a rink -- until the right connection is made.