Loandepot Park

Previously known as Marlins Park, LoanDepot Park is a baseball park located in Miami, Florida. As the venue’s former name might suggest, the park is home to the Miami Marlins, representing the city in Major League Baseball.

LoneDepot Park opened in 2012. The construction works began in 2009, but the project was fairly controversial. The previous venue located in the same acreage was known as Joe Robbie Stadium, although it too changed its name various times throughout its history. It was a multi-purpose stadium, as it was common at the time. The facility hosted baseball and football games, but also soccer and other events. It was named after the founder of the Dolphins, who wanted a stadium that would be optimized for baseball as a way to attract MLB teams to South Florida, where baseball didn’t have a proper “home.” With the arrival of the Marlins in 1993, the team drew over 3 million people during their inaugural season alone. While Robbie tried to prepare the former stadium for baseball games, it didn’t work out very well since it primarily functioned as a football stadium. For one thing, the original stadium had a color scheme that matched the uniform and branding of the Dolphins. As you can imagine, this wasn’t exactly ideal for the Marlins in terms of branding! In addition to that, the farther seats were way too far from the game in a baseball setting, so the Marlins needed to reduce the number of seats to give all viewers a better experience.

To top it all off, the original stadium was far from optimized to the local weather. As you might know, South Florida is distinctive for its tropical summers, often featuring heavy rainfall, oppressive heat, and major humidity. Because of its construction, the former stadium created what was almost a greenhouse effect, making the games so hot that the previous stadium ranked as the hottest one in BLM for that particular season. With all of these shortcomings, the plan for a completely new stadium seemed necessary. While the city was initially not on board with the idea of helping the Marlins pay for a new stadium with taxpayers’ money, eventually, the Miami-Dade County committed public funds to the project fairly early on. The stadium had a financial plan that involved a budget ranging from 420 to 435 million dollars, including plans for a parking garage. The negotiations led to half in 2005 since there was a fear that the levels of public interest in BLM games might not have been significant enough to warrant the allotment of so many public funds for a new baseball stadium. The ordeal dragged on for years and years, with a pretty major lawsuit, political unrest, and even some division in the community. However, the stadium finally opened in 2012. Its construction and design style is meant to embody the spirit of the city of Miami. This also includes some beautiful deco-style wall tiles in pastel green, which mirrors the aesthetics of Little Havana, a strong cultural reference to the city and its people. Despite its years of controversy and the seemingly endless tug of war, the stadium managed to become a beloved local landmark, with the issues of the previous stadium addressed and a spanking new facility that would be perfect for the Marlins and for their audience, which will no longer suffer from excessive heat and humidity due to the better facilities.