Baltimore Orioles Foundation Snapshot
Back when I wrote the very first post in this series, comparing what happened to the Mets and Dodgers foundations after their ownership changes, I flagged the Orioles as the other real case study worth watching, as David Rubenstein bought the team in 2024 and is now one of the wealthiest owners in the league with a deep and well-documented philanthropic history. Unfortunately, the most recent filing we have is for that year, and as expected, any changes to how the Foundation operates cannot yet be seen in the available data.
The Orioles Foundation lands below average on my IMPACT+ score, a 43.9 that puts them #24 of 29, and that's even with a significant pledge the Foundation made in 2023. The then-owner John Angelos announced a $5 million pledge to the CollegeBound Foundation, a Baltimore nonprofit that helps city public-school students afford college. The pledge is being paid out over multiple years, and it shows up cleanly in the data: $1.17 million of the Orioles Foundation's $1.55 million in 2024 grants went to CollegeBound alone, representing 75% of the entire year's giving.
Before this, grants paid sat in a pretty narrow, unremarkable band from 2019 through 2022 — bouncing between $273K and $483K a year, nothing dramatic in either direction.
So while we can't yet determine what Rubenstein has actually done through the Foundation or changes he's implemented, we can see his interests and impact show up in other ways. In July of this year, he told Bloomberg he's buying roughly a dozen 1823 replicas of the Declaration of Independence — out of only 50 that still exist from the original 200 printed — and making replicas of those and giving one to every MLB and NBA stadium owner in the country.
A few other things worth noting while I had the data open. The Foundation is a near-pure pass-through — 94% of expenses go out the door as grants, the fourth-highest ratio of any team I've measured. And it's an old one: founded in 1965, which puts it among the longest-running team foundations in the sport. And back in the Adam Jones era, the Foundation ran a matching-gift program with the outfielder and his wife Audie, jointly donating over $450,000 to Baltimore nonprofits between 2013 and 2018, with the bulk of it — $320,000 — going to Boys & Girls Clubs of Metropolitan Baltimore.