Pirates Charities Snapshot

With Roberto Clemente Day celebrated just two days ago, it's a good time to look at the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Pirates Charities. Unfortunately, in contrast to the legacy of Clemente, the Pirates Charities do not come out well in IMPACT+, ranking last of the 29 teams (remember, there's not enough data to include the Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas Athletics in my analysis).

But with that said, recent news articles indicate that they have become at least a bit more philanthropic since 2024. In April of this year, they announced a $300K donation to the City of Pittsburgh to provide high-end laser-grading equipment to help maintain 20 city ball fields and in July, another $150K for Miracle League's Cambria County's Roxbury Park project. Both gifts are 3-6X larger than their largest grant in 2024.

The Miracle League does appear to be a core focus for the organization as they also host regular fantasy camps for Miracle League athletes in the greater Pittsburgh area as well as near their spring training complex in Florida.

Still, the Pirates raise relatively few dollars annually, and their overall spending is last among all teams. This is despite them having a large asset base that now exceeds $10M. Among the bottom ten teams in IMPACT+, only the Angels have a higher asset base. And the Pirates' assets rank #6 out of the 29 in 2024, ahead of some of the more active team foundations.

Perhaps as new filings come out, we will see them leveraging this to do more. At least we can hope that is the case.