Five days after Pawtucket Red Sox managing partner Larry Lucchino interrupted his birthday party to say he’d be looking for more New England cities to ask for stadium money now that he’d struck out with Providence, there is no shortage of mayors kicking the tires:
John Hill, spokesman for Worcester City Manager Edward Augustus Jr., said while the city is open to discussions with the team, he wouldn’t say whether Augustus would support building a new stadium…
James Leydon, a spokesman for Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno, said the city has a rich history of minor league baseball.
“The mayor would be very open to a conversation with the PawSox on bringing baseball back to Springfield,” Leydon said.
Well, sure, who wouldn’t be open to having a team move to your city? But what about the spending lots of money on a new stadium part that Lucchino wants?
Hill reiterated that Augustus has no intention of using public money to finance a stadium…
Leydon wouldn’t say whether Sarno would consider building a new stadium for the PawSox or using public money for one.
It sounds here like WCVB-TV in Boston just called around to every mayor’s office they could think of for comment, and got a couple of bites, though pretty noncommittal ones. Neither Springfield nor Worcester has an existing minor-league stadium, unless you want to count Worcester’s converted 91-year-old football stadium, which is even older than the stadium in Pawtucket that the Sox are trying to leave. In other words: Call me when you have an actual offer, guys.
WorcestEr!
Aw, crap, I got it right in the article. Hang on, will fix…
Back in the 80’s and 90’s when Springfield’s City Hall was a stepping stone to a corruption indictment they were constantly coming up with minor league ballpark proposals. They were also running massive debts and under state financial board control so they never went anywhere. It seems like the minor league park is an evergreen idea as they already have an arena that hardly gets used (well their minor league hockey team does get 3K a game and already lost a D-league team that had limited support ).
Meant to add this:
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/17/us/debating-stadium-costs-and-benefits.html
There are always political schemes, lovingly unsupported by any empirical evidence, to expensively “return prosperity” to Massachusetts’s smaller cities. Commuter rail to Boston is one that can’t seem to get off the ground, so not sure how this one will find any support–given Massachusetts’s general dislike for building stadiums with any public money.
It is a shame to see cities that provided so much to America reduced to groveling for something so dull as AA baseball.
Is Springfield even possible? Wouldn’t it conflict with the new Hartford AA team’s territory?
“It is a shame to see cities that provided so much to America reduced to groveling for something so dull as AA baseball.”
A city is mostly just a collection of people, and almost all of those people are dead. Save your tears for more worthy targets. It is the nature of human life that it is mutable and things rise and fall, especially over generations.
I mean by your logic maybe the whole US should be supporting the English countryside.
Why not move to Pittsfield’s Wahconah Park? This park truly provides a turn-of-the-century baseball experience more than Wrigley or Fenway can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahconah_Park
“One of the last remaining ballparks in the United States with a wooden grandstand, it was constructed in 1919 and seats 4,500….Because the field was constructed before the advent of field lighting, no harm was seen in orienting the diamond due west….games are sometimes temporarily suspended while the sun sets.”
https://www.google.com/search?q=wahconah+park+baseball&safe=active&biw=1276&bih=697&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAgQ_AUoA2oVChMI2L2HrLGQyAIVCTs-Ch2S_AvT
Fitton Field includes both a football and baseball field, neither sharing stands. They are completely separate, though next to each other, and just share names. It is not like the stadium in Portland where AAA baseball and Portland State football both played. The football stadium holds 23,500 and the baseball stadium 3,500. You can see both from I-290.
3,000, not 3,500.