The MLB All-Star Legacy Initiative
As I noted in the previous post, MLB and host clubs have given nearly $125M to local communities through the All-Star Legacy initiative since its inception, dating back to 1997. I went back and looked at press releases and news stories to document the impact these efforts have made. I was able to go back all the way to 2012 before hitting a brick wall — going further would take a much deeper, more rigorous dig through local news archives and other coverage, or getting teams or MLB itself to provide the information directly. Still, what I do have offers a lot of interesting data.
When the initiative launched in 1997, the game was hosted in Cleveland, and it was named the All-Star Legacy Program. The flagship project was construction of the Larry Doby All-Star Playground at the King Kennedy Boys & Girls Club — its opening and celebration fell almost exactly 50 years to the day after Doby's first major league game on July 5, 1947. When Cleveland hosted again in 2019, the Doby All-Star Playground was once again a featured project, this time for a renovation.
Two patterns stood out while building this data set and are worth flagging before getting into the financials. First, the fields themselves: across the 15 years with project-level detail (2012–2026), Legacy Initiative dollars have built or renovated 59 baseball and softball fields. Second, 13 of those same 14 years (excluding 2020) included some form of investment tied to a local Boys & Girls Club — teen center construction, activity centers, STEAM rooms, field upgrades, even a dedicated scholarship fund for Boys & Girls Club Metro LA seniors in 2022. The lone exception is 2023, when the only mention of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America in that year's press release was the standard line naming it as one of the initiative's three recurring national partners — boilerplate, not a project. That kind of consistency isn't an accident: BGCA has been a national MLB partner for years, and it shows up in the Legacy Initiative's local investments almost every single year.
And for this year's game, we see something similar. According to an MLB.com story, Ashburn Field, named after Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn, is being renovated as part of this year's Initiative, and it was built in 1998 using funds generated from the 1996 game hosted in Philadelphia. You can read more about this year's projects here - https://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-phillies-charities-inc-announce-2026-all-star-legacy-projects
One of the questions I was interested in answering was: where does the money come from? The typical figure is between $4M and $6M, though some years have deviated significantly — more on that below. To answer this, I looked at each host club's financials for that year, as well as the year before and the year after.
2019 — Cleveland: In 2018, revenue was $1.9M, contributions were $449K, expenses were $1.5M, and grants made were $425K. In 2019, their foundation had revenue of $4.6M, contributions of $3.1M, expenses of $4.6M, and grants paid of $655K. In 2020, they went back to non-All-Star-year numbers, and the 2019 990-PF confirms $2.9M of their investment was tied to the Legacy Program. The press release from that year states approximately $5M was invested through the program, leaving $2.1M that must have come from MLB or its charitable arm.
We'll skip 2020 — the game was canceled due to COVID, so there's no Legacy Program spending to track. The Dodgers had originally been slated to host that year, which is part of why their 2022 numbers (below) look inflated relative to a normal single-year bump.
2021 — Colorado Rockies: The press release says approximately $5M was invested through the program, and once again we see spikes in revenue ($2.2M versus under $1M in both 2020 and 2022), contributions, expenses, and grants made — though expenses only increased by about $600K. That gap suggests either (a) their Legacy contributions cannibalized their typical giving, or (b) MLB provided additional funding that never hit the foundation's own books.
2022 — Los Angeles Dodgers: The Dodgers hosted and raised over $6M, though some of that was carried over from their efforts in 2020, when they had originally been scheduled to host. Here we see dramatic increases across the board for the Dodgers Foundation — most notably, expenses jumped from $8.4M in 2021 to over $14M in 2022, before settling back down to $12M in 2023. The Dodgers were already on an upward giving trajectory, so this increase is likely a combination of their ongoing strategy plus the added revenue and visibility that comes with hosting the All-Star Game.
2023 — Seattle Mariners: The press release notes only $2M in investments — field renovations and grants to non-profits combined — a dramatic decrease from prior years. Mariners Care has traditionally run low expenses (under $1M through 2024), so we don't see the same spike pattern here that we saw with prior hosts, which leads me to believe MLB did most of the heavy lifting on this one.
2024 — Texas Rangers: The Rangers hosted and invested approximately $7M alongside MLB. Their foundation expenses doubled, from $3.5M to $7M, and while we don't have 2025 data yet, I'd guess we'll see a pullback to their usual $3M–$4M expense range — matching the pattern we've seen from other All-Star hosts.
Interestingly, the Rangers' $7M wasn't the largest Legacy investment in the data set. In 2014, the Twins hosted, and with additional contributions from Carl Pohlad's personal foundation, the press release noted over $8.5M invested. The Reds' 2015 investment came in at over $8M as well.
What's clear across these six years is that the "Legacy investment" number MLB puts in a press release rarely maps cleanly onto a foundation's own books. Sometimes it shows up as a genuine spike in grants paid (Cleveland, the Dodgers). Sometimes it inflates program expenses without touching the grants line at all (the Rangers). And sometimes — like Seattle in 2023 — the foundation's numbers barely move, which tells you MLB Charities is doing most of the lifting centrally.