Bradenton Marauders, Salvation Army team up to fulfill wishes for ‘forgotten angels’

While most kids celebrate the holidays with gifts and presents, others don’t have that luxury.

The Bradenton Marauders and their holiday mascot, Marty Claus, are looking to change that.

On Saturday, the minor league baseball team hosted Marty’s Toy Drive at Pirate City, 1701 27th St. E., Bradenton, to collect toys for the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree program.

Families in need signed up for the program in September, leaving the name, age and gender of their child, as well as a wish list of three toys and their clothing sizes. From there, the children are added to the Angel Tree and generous individuals may choose to fulfill their holiday wishes.

Gifts from Saturday’s toy drive will be distributed to the “forgotten angels” who hadn’t had their names pulled from the tree, according to Kelly French, director of communication for the Salvation Army.

Last year, Marty’s toy drive collected more than 200 toys for the Salvation Army, but Katie Fritz, the Marauders’ marketing and community relations coordinator, was hoping for a bit more this year.

“Hopefully we can get more than that this year,” Fritz said. “We’ve been trying to get the word out through social media and email newsletters, and doing everything we can to make it bigger and better.”

Her wish, along with the wishes of hundreds of needy children, came true. Donations came in non-stop from Marauders fans, from gift bags filled with toys to a truckload of scooters.

“We try to do something every year to get the company and the kids involved,” said Kristie Meyer, who joined her family’s Cole Contracting Corp. in donating 100 Razor scooters. “The community is good to us, so we take care of them.”

Other donors echoed Meyer’s sentiment and said it’s nice to provide for kids who don’t have anything during this time of the year.

“It’s a great cause, and we’re Marauders fans so it’s a double treat for us,” said Pat Van Stedum.

Hilda Murphy filled the back of her SUV to the brim with toys, including water balloon sets, a pogo stick and two children’s bicycles. She said you can’t go wrong taking care of the community.

“Children are the future of this country, so we need to bond together to support everybody,” said Murphy. “When they get older, perhaps they’ll do the same. Maybe they’ll be the givers in the future. That’s how I look at it.”

French said players from the Marauders joined the Salvation Army at the agency’s warehouse to assist in the process of bagging the gifts from children in the Angel Tree program. Some of them even chose a child and went shopping for them.

“They loved it, but you could tell some of them have never been shopping for little girls before,” said French. “For the little boys, they were like ‘Oh yeah, I’ll get him this and this!’ When it came to the girls, there was a lot of ‘What’s this? Is this what she wants?’ It was really cute.”

The Salvation Army is giving gifts to more than 2,000 kids this year, according to French. Families will begin picking up the donated gifts for their children later this week.

“This is huge, especially this year. If you think about how Hurricane Irma affected people,” said French. “The week after Irma, we had so many people calling us asking how they could register for the Adopt-A-Family program.”

The 2017 Marty’s Toy Drive exceeded Fritz’s expectations, but there are still plans to make the event even more of a success next year. In the future, the toy drive will be combined with the Marauders’ 5K run that usually takes place in the summer, which was canceled this year as the team looked to revamp their approach.

Fritz expects the 5K event to be more popular in December because of the cooler weather. Combining the two events should result in larger attendance and more donations, too.

“The more people we can help, the happier we are,” said French. “We’d like to see the number of people who need help decrease because that means things are better in our economy, but we still want to be able to reach as many people as we can.”

This story was originally published December 16, 2017 at 1:17 PM with the headline "Bradenton Marauders, Salvation Army team up to fulfill wishes for ‘forgotten angels’."