The Miami Orange Bowl, its name spelled out in tall coral letters across the upper facade above palm trees and the concrete grille of the West Plaza entrance

Why loanDepot Park Matters

The quick read

The Marlins own one of the strangest resumes in baseball. The franchise arrived as an expansion team in 1993, won the World Series in 1997 and again in 2003, and entered the postseason both times as a wild card. It has never won its division, and it has never lost a World Series it reached. Both titles were followed by teardowns that stripped the roster to the studs. The park came later: it opened in 2012 on the site of the demolished Orange Bowl in Little Havana, first as Marlins Park, a publicly financed contemporary-art statement from then-owner Jeffrey Loria, and since 2021 as loanDepot park, after a new ownership group spent its first seasons removing most of what Loria had built into it.

An expansion team, 1993

Major League Baseball awarded Miami a franchise on June 10, 1991. The Florida Marlins played their first game on April 5, 1993, and won it, 6-3 over the Los Angeles Dodgers at Joe Robbie Stadium.

That building was the Dolphins’ football stadium in Miami Gardens, and it was home for the franchise’s first nineteen seasons, 1993 through 2011, under a rotating set of names: Joe Robbie, Pro Player, Sun Life. Baseball in an open-air football stadium, in the rain belt of South Florida. The push for a baseball-only park with a roof ran through most of those years before anything got built.

1997: a title, then a fire sale

The 1997 Marlins reached the postseason as a wild card in just their fifth season and went all the way through it. The World Series against Cleveland ran seven games. In the bottom of the eleventh inning of Game 7, Edgar Rentería singled up the middle to score Craig Counsell, and a five-year-old franchise had a championship.

Then owner Wayne Huizenga stripped it. Within months of the title the roster was sold off piece by piece, one of the most infamous fire sales in the sport’s history, and the defending champions collapsed the following season.

2003: another wild card, another title

The 2003 team started badly enough that the club handed the manager’s job to 72-year-old Jack McKeon in May. The team turned around under him and got into the postseason as a wild card again. The NLCS against the Cubs became one of the most replayed series ever: in the eighth inning of Game 6 at Wrigley Field, with Chicago five outs from the pennant, a foul ball came down near a fan named Steve Bartman, and the Marlins went on to score eight runs in the inning. They won that game and then Game 7.

In the World Series the Marlins beat the Yankees in six games. Josh Beckett closed it out at Yankee Stadium, a complete-game shutout in Game 6. Another teardown followed, slower than the first but pointed the same direction, and Beckett himself was traded to Boston within two years.

The full franchise picture is short and strange. Two World Series appearances, two titles, both years in as a wild card. No division title, ever.

The park on the Orange Bowl site

The Miami Orange Bowl stood in Little Havana for seven decades before it was demolished in 2008. The Marlins’ ballpark went up on the same ground and opened for the 2012 season as Marlins Park. The first game was April 4, 2012, a 4-1 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals.

Jeffrey Loria, the owner who built it, was an art dealer by trade, and he conceived the building as a contemporary-art ballpark. Populous designed it: a colored-glass facade, a retractable roof, LEED Gold certification. Inside went a replica of a Joan Miró piece behind home plate and a Roy Lichtenstein reproduction. Over the center-field wall stood the Home Run Sculpture, a $2.5 million kinetic piece by Red Grooms, commissioned through Miami-Dade’s Art in Public Places program, that lit up and spun whenever a Marlin homered. Behind the left-field wall sat the Clevelander, a South Beach-style nightclub with a swimming pool.

The money is the other half of the story. The park was largely publicly financed through a Miami-Dade County bond deal, and that deal remains locally infamous: the borrowing terms drew years of criticism and lasting political fallout in Miami.

The de-Loria years

Loria sold the team in 2017 to a group led by Bruce Sherman that included Derek Jeter. What followed was a systematic removal of the Loria signatures.

In October 2018 the Miami-Dade Art in Public Places trust voted, at the new ownership’s request, to move the Home Run Sculpture out of the building. It was reinstalled in February 2020 outside on the plaza, where it anchors an outdoor art walk, and it runs its animation every day at 3:05 p.m., a nod to Miami’s 305 area code. The Clevelander and its pool were removed ahead of the 2020 season. The space behind the left-field wall is now The Bullpen Bar & Grill. The same offseason the fences came in, center field from 407 feet to 400 and right-center from 392 to 387, and synthetic turf replaced the grass.

The rename and the World Baseball Classic

On March 31, 2021 the Marlins announced the sale of naming rights to loanDepot, reported at roughly $10 million a year, and Marlins Park became loanDepot park.

The building has become a regular international-baseball venue. It hosted World Baseball Classic games in 2013 and 2017, and in 2023 it staged the championship game, which ended with Shohei Ohtani striking out Mike Trout to win Japan the title.

José Fernández

José Fernández was born in Cuba and reached the United States as a teenager after multiple attempts to defect. He won the National League Rookie of the Year award in 2013, made two All-Star teams, and was the franchise’s brightest star of the 2010s, an electric young pitcher in a heavily Cuban-American baseball city.

He died in a boating accident off Miami Beach early on September 25, 2016. He was 24. The Marlins canceled that day’s game. When the team returned to the field the next night, every player wore a jersey with Fernández’s name and No. 16, and Dee Gordon led off the bottom of the first inning with a home run. No Marlin has worn No. 16 since.

Postseason at this building

Since the building opened, the Marlins have reached the postseason twice, in 2020 and again in 2023, both times as a wild card, and neither run brought a single postseason game to this park. The 2020 wild-card round was played in Chicago and that year’s division series at a neutral site, and the 2023 wild-card series was played in Philadelphia. As of the 2025 season, loanDepot park has never hosted a Marlins postseason game.

Billy the Marlin has been the mascot since the franchise’s first season in 1993.