Miami Marlins Foundation Snapshot

Another story from childhood. This was back in the day before my family had a desktop computer. I must have been 8 years old, and the way we would find out what little league team we were on was from a phone call from the coach, who would have to call everyone on the team. I forget if I answered the phone or if one of my parents told me, but I was on the "Florida Marlins". I remember saying something to the effect of "that's not a baseball team", only to be corrected by my oldest brother who explained that two new teams, the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins, were about to join the MLB.

So perhaps not that interesting of a story, but I thought of it as I was compiling the data for the Miami Marlins Foundation. While the team started nearly 35 years ago, their foundation is actually new, having been established in 2019. Before that, it seems that it was run as a donor-advised fund of The Miami Foundation. This is a first in my research, and I really don't know what to make of it. There are news stories of their giving and efforts during this time, so they were doing "something". Perhaps the old owner(s) liked the privacy of a DAF; or perhaps they didn't want to invest in the setting up their own foundation. If you know anything about this, please do let me know.

Then there is the sale of the team to Bruce Sherman and Derek Jeter at the end of the 2017 season. It looks like it took a year or so, but they established a private foundation, and now we have data from 2019 onward.

They seem to be taking this seriously, increasing their assets at a nice clip and increasing the amount they are investing through grants and direct programming. In the other example of what happens to a foundation when a team is sold (the Mets), I saw sizeable contributions from the new owners as well as transfers of assets from the old foundation to the new one. In this case, I don't see any evidence of that. In fact, much of the money that was donated to the newly established foundation in 2019 came from players - Martin Prado and Wei-Yin Chen both gave $150,000, representing more than 50% of the contributions received that year. In fact, out of the foundations that file as a Private Foundation and have to disclose donors >$5K, there are many more players that give to the Marlins Foundation than the other teams, though it is a small sample size so far (Guardians and Mets are the only ones I have data for so far).