April 2023: Rallying the Team for Masons4Mitts

As the final few minutes of the Masons4Mitts season ticked away, Jon Rick kept refreshing his browser tab. Each time, his team’s total kept inching up—as did two others of his district’s teams, in what was turning into a heated three-way race. “Even with the program’s being tied to a sport, which is naturally competitive, and our having a friendly competition within the fraternity, I was surprised by how competitive the teams got,” says Rick, the master of Consuelo No. 325 who was serving as a first-time captain for the Northside Sharks Masons4Mitts team in 2022.

The fundraising aspect may well have brought out the sportsman in local lodges’ membership, but ultimately the big winner was the kids. Thanks in part to that last-minute flurry of activity, Rick’s Northside Sharks team set a team record for donations to Masons4Mitts. So too did the entire San Diego region, which raised more than $50,000 benefitting the San Diego Padres’ Foundation for Children. In fact, Masons set fundraising records in all four Major League partner regions in 2022, setting a new single-season high of $281,206 for the program—the equivalent of more than 14,000 mitts.

Now, as the 2023 Major League Baseball season kicks off, Rick is looking to tap back into that friendly competitive spirit to raise the bar even higher. This season, the statewide program—in partnership with the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of California—expects to pass $2 million in total to its four MLB community partners. 

Rick won’t be alone in trying to reach that goal. In fact, in 2023, there are an incredible 23 first-time Masons4Mitts team captains signed up to lead awareness- and fundraising drives among local lodges. (That’s 17 in Northern California, and six in SoCal.) That’s a good thing: Just as with a big-league baseball team, it’s often those rookie call-ups who can help push a team from good to great. Even Rick is now sharing captain duties with a first-timer, in Sevan Serafino of Vista No. 687.

Get used to seeing a lot of playing time from all those first-timers: The goal this year is for captains to reach every lodge in their district each month during the season—that's every lodge, every month—to explain the program, where the funds go, and the difference it makes in the lives of young people in the area. 

That's an important point. Far from just giving a kid a mitt, Masons4Mitts’ Major League partner foundations are able to provide young people—often those living in disadvantaged communities—with an enriching summer experience that goes far beyond the game of baseball. Many of the youth leagues also incorporate educational programming about nutrition, fitness, anti-bullying, and some social services like eye exams. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ community foundation’s slogan, for instance, is “Bigger Than Baseball”—a reference to the wide range of educational, health care, and youth development programs it operates or sponsors.

“That philanthropic aspect, of supporting young folks in need, really speaks to me,” Rick says. “That’s something that drew me to Masonry in the very beginning. For all the friendly competition, I think the brothers really rallied around the fact that we’re supporting youth who might otherwise not have access to this kind of activity. That’s what really sells it—it’s at the core of Masonry and the tenets we hold dear.”