The Marlins, a team with zero in the way of preseason expectations, were one of the sport’s feel-good stories last year, rallying from an early-season COVID outbreak to reach the playoffs for the first time since 2003. But at the end of the day, the Marlins will always be the Marlins, a chronically-mismanaged, perennially underfunded, consistently unsuccessful franchise playing to nonexistent crowds at their laughably garish home stadium in South Florida. Tuesday the Marlins announced a new stadium naming rights deal with California-based LoanDepot (stylized as loanDepot), which is apparently—and I’m taking this verbatim from Wikipedia—“the second-largest non-bank provider of direct-to-consumer loans in the United States.” To that end, Marlins Park will now be known as loanDepot Park.
Even in a sports landscape increasingly flooded by brand awareness and shameless product placement (the MSU Spartans presented by Rocket Mortgage, for instance), this may take the cake as the most nauseating display of corporate sponsorship yet. Unfortunately, the headache of stadium naming rights is an all-too-familiar one for residents of greater Miami. In its 30-plus years of existence, the Dolphins’ home venue has undergone countless name changes (Joe Robbie Stadium, Pro Player Park, Dolphins Stadium, Land Shark Stadium, Sun Life Stadium and now Hard Rock Stadium), exhausting fans with its never-ending parade of corporate plugs.
As you’d expect, social media did not take kindly to Miami’s hasty rebranding efforts, rightfully roasting the Marlins for the stadium’s poorly-chosen name, a humiliating gaffe exacerbated by its seeming disregard for widely-accepted capitalization and punctuation norms.
Many will recall that Florida was at the epicenter of the 2008 recession (as detailed in The Big Short, a best-selling book later adapted into an Academy-Award-nominated film directed by Adam McKay), an economic crisis caused in large part by the housing market’s collapse amid millions of unpaid loans and mortgages. Armed with that knowledge, you could see why the name loanDepot might hit a little too close to home for some Floridians.
The universally-panned loanDepot Park (as toxic as social media can be, glorious reactions to events like this almost justify its existence) has taken some of the heat off the White Sox who, up until earlier today, had laid claim to arguably the worst-named stadium in baseball, Guaranteed Rate Field.
In a span of three-plus years, the Marlins’ new ownership group led by CEO Derek Jeter has effectively removed any last shred of Miami’s previous identity, scrapping their logo, uniforms, the team’s center-field sculpture, the fish tank behind home plate and now their stadium name. Of course, it all harkens back to the age-old question, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? While a poorly-conceived stadium name might be headline news in some parts of the country, considering Miami’s famously tepid fan base, the change to loanDepot Park might not even register.
Clown the Marlins at your own peril, because eventually, even the most beloved and sponsorship-averse stadiums in America will cave to their corporate overlords, at which point, no one will even bat an eye when a small-market Florida team decides to name their park after the second-largest non-bank provider of direct-to-consumer loans in the United States.
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