Employer: Yourself

Openings: Contact a current owner

Salary Cap: Several million dollars

Number of Jobs: About 200

In 1998, Boulton ended a 25-year-career as a bond trader and moved on to baseball full-time. Today, he owns and runs the Long Island Ducks, an independent minor league baseball franchise that plays in a routinely packed 6,000-seat stadium in Central Islip, New York.

“There’s a lot of demand for this product,” he boasts.

Though Boulton won’t release revenue numbers, he estimates the Ducks are worth about $24 million, or four times the amount of money he has put into the franchise over the years. His robust return is probably no coincidence—Boulton developed plenty of business acumen running the government bonds department at Smith Barney and then founding and running the mortgage-backed security department at UBS, among other jobs. He’s found ample opportunity to use his business skills at his new gig.

Minor league baseball teams, he says, are basically “giant marketing machines.” The entire outfield fence at the Ducks’ Citibank Park is plastered with billboards advertising sponsors ranging from Pepsi to Radisson to American Express. Recruiting and retaining such sponsors takes up a “big part of the year,” Boulton says. And to keep his team in the public eye and sell tickets, Boulton must also stay involved in the community—in March, he was the grand marshal of the Bay Shore Saint Patrick’s Day parade.

His competitive nature served him well on Wall Street and, Boulton says, it also comes in handy as a minor league team owner. Baseball exercises “a different part of the brain,” he says, but the feeling of striving for victory and measuring yourself at the end of the day is similar.

Boulton’s journey back into baseball started in 1980 when an old college pal called to tell him he and some friends were buying a minor league baseball team in Hagerstown, Maryland, and to ask if he’d be interested in buying a 25 percent stake for $50,000. “I looked at it, and I passed on it,” Boulton says. “But it piqued my interest. I started to follow it.”

As Boulton watched the prices of minor league teams continue to rise, he realized he may have missed something. He eventually ponied up $500,000 to buy half of a Yankee-affiliated minor league team in Woodbridge, Virginia, and sold it later for a small profit to his partner. By then, he was hooked.

He later led a group that invested $2.5 million to buy the Pennsylvania Pilots of Hampton, Virginia, and move them to a new stadium in Wilmington, Delaware; four years later, he sold that team for a 250 percent profit. In the 1990s, he headed a group of investors that pooled $3 million to buy the double-A Albany-Colonie Yankees, a team that Boulton hoped to move near his home in Long Island, New York. But in 1993, the New York Mets, who play nearby in Queens, New York, argued that it would have an “adverse financial impact” on their franchise and convinced Major League Baseball to reject the plan.

Outraged, Boulton launched the independent Atlantic League, an alliance of seven new teams across the East Coast not affiliated with any major league team. He continued to work as a bond trader and owned a team, but when his employer, a Japanese bond company, shut down its American offices in 1998, he decided to devote himself full-time to running the just-launched Long Island Ducks.

He’s been at it ever since. Often drawing from the pool of talent released by major league teams on the last day of spring training, the Ducks offer players a way to stay in shape, keep up their profile, and make enough money to get by (on average about $2,100 a month). Among the Ducks’ current players are several former major league players like Carl Everett, José Offerman, and Joe Valentine.

“We’ve tried to help a lot of players over the years get back to the big leagues,” Boulton says. He estimates that some 40 of his Ducks players have later been signed by Major League Baseball. Among the veteran major leaguers who have done stints in the Atlantic League before returning are Rickey Henderson, Jose Canseco, Juan Gonzalez, Rubén Sierra, Dante Bichette, Tim Raines, José Lima, and John Rocker.

Now in their ninth season, the Ducks have a 6,002-seat ballpark that sells out for virtually every game. Turning a good profit is satisfying, but Boulton is clear on the best part.

“You get a chance to celebrate with the players and the fans, and the whole community becomes electric,” he says. “Seeing people have a good time is the real reward.”