Sharply dressed, the Texas-born billionaire sat behind a crateload of money - bundles of US$10,000 in US$50 bills - and outlined his strategy for Twenty20 cricket to take over the game.
English cricket has never seen anything like it.
The mustachioed American, who has lived in the Caribbean for 26 years, says he wants to give something back to his adopted community.
So, he's spending US$100 million to fund five Twenty20 matches over five years between England and his West Indies selection, the Stanford Super Stars. The first $20 million winner-take-all match will be held Nov. 1 in Antigua.
It's the richest payday for a professional cricketer - US$1 million for each of the 11 players on the winning team, with the remainder split between the reserve players and staff and national cricket associations.
Stanford said he wanted the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) involved in the concept because he believed the country that invented cricket could help revolutionize it.
"With the right financial support behind it and the right vision, it can be the dominant team sport in the world, that's bigger than football," Stanford said.
Stanford also hopes to reintroduce cricket to the Olympics - it made one appearance in 1900.
"I think Twenty20 is destined to be an Olympic sport if the ECB drives the sport to the next level," Stanford said. "In 10 years, I think it can be."
Stanford has little time for the traditional form of the game, test matches which can often go five days without a winner. He instead compared test and Twenty20 cricket with differing architectural styles at Lord's, where an elevated sleek pod that houses the press box looks over stately buildings.
"I find it boring but I'm not a purist," Stanford admitted when quizzed on test cricket. "Here at Lord's the buildings go back to the 1700s, that's test cricket. If you look at the new 'Eye in the Sky' (the modern media center at Lord's), that's the Twenty20 game.
"You could no more do away with the 'Eye in the Sky' than you could do away with that 1700s building. Test cricket is the foundation, where cricket came from. Twenty20, however, is the future and that's where you'll make your money."
Despite a regional connection, each of the Caribbean islands and Guyana are unique. But cricket united the region after independence from Britain under the West Indies banner, and the team dominated the sport in the 1970s and 1980s.
Now, it's languishing - eighth out of nine teams in the test rankings and eighth out of 12 in the limited-overs rankings.
Stanford calls cricket "the glue that binds us all together and I want to do everything I can to bring it back up."
He's already funded a Caribbean Twenty20 competition since 2006, held every two years.
The 58-year-old Stanford first made his fortune in the 1980s in Houston real estate, then expanded his grandfather's Stanford Financial Group into a global financial services provider, which now manages US$50 billion worldwide.
According to Forbes, he's the 605th richest man in the world, worth US$2 billion, and holds Antigua citizenship and a home in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
He's also an honorary knight, an honor normally given to British and some Commonwealth citizens by Queen Elizabeth II. He was knighted by the government of Antigua and Barbuda in 2006.
While his Stanford Financial Group sponsors other sports and athletes, Stanford's personal passion is for Twenty20, the most condensed form of international cricket that is usually over within three hours.
"This has a more charitable streak to it," Stanford said. "I'm doing things with cricket in the Caribbean that I would not ever do in any other business, marketing or branding of the Stanford financial name.
"Do we get image and brand awareness of that by today? Of course we do. But it takes a lot more money that we'll actually probably get."
Stanford is not the first wealthy businessman to try and change the face of cricket. Australian media magnate Kerry Packer got there first, launching World Series Cricket between 1977 and 1979, taking the game to new stadiums, introducing a white ball, floodlighting, colored uniforms, new marketing techniques and putting a heavier emphasis on 50-over cricket - primarily to make it more suitable for his television network to improve cricket's flagging ratings.
Stanford is implementing changes, too. The event even has its own reggae-inspired theme tune. Players will use black bats - a move reluctantly allowed by the game's lawmakers, the Lord's-based Marylebone Cricket Club - while the wickets will be silver colored instead of natural timber.
All this is in stark contrast to the normally conservative ECB, whose chief executive David Collier was forced to fend off accusations Stanford's investment could be construed to the cricket purists as "vulgar."
"There are broad benefits financially," Collier said. "And that cricket is headline news when there's a major football tournament on (European Championship) just shows how important this tournament is to the future of cricket."
And although it is destined to draw criticism from traditionalists, England great Ian Botham said cricket should embrace the change, not fear the death of test cricket.
"You don't have any of these 20-over games without test cricket," Botham said. "How do you pick the players? How do you get the superstars of cricket in the arenas? You need a staging point - test cricket will always be a bench mark. So if it's the icing on the cake for players, then so be it."
