Texas Rangers Baseball Foundation Snapshot
Do I need to add an asterisk?
I was 13 when Cal Ripken Jr. played his 2,131st consecutive game and passed Lou Gehrig's record. One of the things I remember about that time is how some people thought the record needed an asterisk because of the strike-shortened 1994 season. I'm sure that nowadays this would be fodder for endless takes on social media, podcasts, and the rest of the hot-take industry.
When I look at the Texas Rangers Baseball Foundation and their 2024 IMPACT+ score of 164 — good for 4th in all of MLB — I find myself asking the same question. (IMPACT+ is a scoring system I developed to measure MLB foundation community investment relative to franchise size and revenue, indexed so that 100 = league average.)
In 2024, the Foundation recorded a one-time capital expense tied to the MLB All-Star Legacy Initiative — a nearly $7M joint MLB/Rangers investment to renovate the south side baseball field at the Mercy Street Sports Complex in West Dallas. The last remaining natural grass field was converted to synthetic turf, creating three simultaneous 12U playing surfaces for a community that was regularly losing months of play to poor drainage. This is a meaningful investment. But it's a one-time event, not a signal of a new deployment strategy, and the 2025 990 won't be available for some time to tell us what the baseline looks like going forward.
Run the IMPACT+ calculation without it, and their score drops below 40 — bottom quartile of all MLB foundations.
That context matters because the Rangers hold the largest asset base of any MLB foundation — $31.6M, more than 30% ahead of the next closest teams, the Blue Jays and Red Sox at roughly $26–27M. The difference is that both of those foundations deploy far more in annual grants and programs. The Rangers' reserve has grown steadily while grant deployment has remained modest.
I knew IMPACT+ would need refinement as this research progressed, and this case makes it clear I need to think about how to account for how foundations manage and deploy their assets — not just how they spend relative to franchise valuation and revenue.
What do you think? Leave your comments below or send me an email.