Well guess what, I'm both mad and disappointed at the news of the Pawtucket Red Sox, Boston's Triple-A affiliate, shipping up Route 146 to Worcester.
Mostly, I'm confused.
Mostly, I'm confused.
It's hard to differentiate a passion of the Boston Red Sox from one of their minor league affiliates. At the end of the day, isn't it all a part of the same operation? I should be rooting for the PawSox to succeed, same with the Portland Sea Dogs, the Lowell Spinners, et al. Not to say I need the PawSox to capture an International League pennant the way I need the Red Sox to take home the American League, but you get the point.
Apparently, it's not all for one and one for all, at least with Larry Lucchino involved. Exiled from John Henry's ownership group of the big club in 2015 to take control of Pawtucket, what is Lucchino's angle here even? Besides money, of course. A soon-to-be 73-year-old zillionaire can never have too much of that.
For as much as I despise the relocation of the Seattle SuperSonics to Oklahoma City, the owner who executed the move, Clay Bennett, is from Oklahoma. That much I get.
Lucchino? From Pittsburgh, went to Princeton and Yale. It's not as though he's fulfilling a lifelong dream of moving a team to his hometown, where minor league baseball has already failed on more occasion than one, but I digress.
How many new fans will this move really create? People in Worcester are already Red Sox fans, by and large. This move is not creating new fans at a time when baseball needs them; in case you haven't heard, major league attendance is down about 6 percent in 2018. As recently as 2008, the PawSox led the International League in attendance. They did the same in 2005 and 2006.
How many fans will this move alienate? Quite a few. The Providence metro area (which Pawtucket is a part of) is roughly 1.6 million. That includes the South Coast of Massachusetts, cities such as Fall River and New Bedford. Worcester's metro population is about 923,000.
Throw those numbers against the wall to make the argument for Pawtucket if you must, but the real alienation comes with the entire state of Rhode Island.
Already feeling jilted by the big club thanks to the Curt Schilling/38 Studios debacle, which is certainly another story for another time, native Rhode Islanders have every right to deem this move to Worcester as a slap in the face. It is spitting in the face of the late Ben Mondor, who owned the PawSox until his death in 2010 with only one mission in mind: affordable family fun.
Massachusetts already has the Red Sox and Lowell Spinners...not to mention the Patriots, Bruins and Celtics. The PawSox -- and Providence Bruins, of course -- are Rhode Island's teams, still on the same page as the varsity clubs up I-95, but unmistakably points of Rhody pride.
Almost no one who goes to a PawSox or P-Bruins game truly cares about whether the home team wins or loses. It's all about the fan experience, the family atmosphere and the fun you can have on a night out with friends at a cost anywhere from 100 to 1,000,000 times more affordable than a night at Fenway, Gillette or the TD Garden.
And now Rhode Islanders will be deprived of summer nights at McCoy Stadium, an older ballpark but hardly one that's falling apart. I'd go as far as calling it a beautiful ballpark, even.
McCoy opened in 1942 and was renovated twice in the '90s to keep up with the times. Get this, wanna know another ballpark in the area that was ancient and needed some renovations to keep up with the times? You know the answer. And the current state of McCoy is nowhere near as downtrodden as Fenway was once upon a time. Using the minor league stadium's age is a major league cop out.
Just how turned off to baseball will this make the state of Rhode Island as it relates to the Red Sox? Burning a whole segment of your fan base doesn't seem like great business.
Is it sacrilegious to even think Rhode Islanders should have every right to gravitate towards another major league team, particularly ones that aren't all that far from here? If I'm the Yankees or Mets, I'm doing everything in my power to convert baseball fans in this region. Pony up the big bucks to get YES and SNY on basic cable and/or sports packages in the area. Yankees games are already simulcast on 790 AM locally. Seeing as how it's the 21st century, there's also the MLB.tv app, if fans wanted to cancel NESN altogether.
One of Lucchino's final acts with the varsity club was the low-ball offer to Jon Lester in the winter of 2013-14, the infamous "hometown discount" deal where Lester was reportedly offered a four-year, $70 million contract extension. You know how that turned out, what with Lester going on to win a World Series with the Cubs and David Price still 0-fer in the postseason as a starter and all. That has very little to do with today's announcement, just something else to consider when it comes to Lucchino.
The lease for the PawSox at McCoy runs through 2020, apparently. Could we have a Simpsons situation where someone pulls a Homer Simpson and goes on hunger strike to prevent the PawSox/Springfield Isotopes from moving to Worcester/Albuquerque?
For as much as I despise the relocation of the Seattle SuperSonics to Oklahoma City, the owner who executed the move, Clay Bennett, is from Oklahoma. That much I get.
Lucchino? From Pittsburgh, went to Princeton and Yale. It's not as though he's fulfilling a lifelong dream of moving a team to his hometown, where minor league baseball has already failed on more occasion than one, but I digress.
How many new fans will this move really create? People in Worcester are already Red Sox fans, by and large. This move is not creating new fans at a time when baseball needs them; in case you haven't heard, major league attendance is down about 6 percent in 2018. As recently as 2008, the PawSox led the International League in attendance. They did the same in 2005 and 2006.
How many fans will this move alienate? Quite a few. The Providence metro area (which Pawtucket is a part of) is roughly 1.6 million. That includes the South Coast of Massachusetts, cities such as Fall River and New Bedford. Worcester's metro population is about 923,000.
Throw those numbers against the wall to make the argument for Pawtucket if you must, but the real alienation comes with the entire state of Rhode Island.
Already feeling jilted by the big club thanks to the Curt Schilling/38 Studios debacle, which is certainly another story for another time, native Rhode Islanders have every right to deem this move to Worcester as a slap in the face. It is spitting in the face of the late Ben Mondor, who owned the PawSox until his death in 2010 with only one mission in mind: affordable family fun.
Massachusetts already has the Red Sox and Lowell Spinners...not to mention the Patriots, Bruins and Celtics. The PawSox -- and Providence Bruins, of course -- are Rhode Island's teams, still on the same page as the varsity clubs up I-95, but unmistakably points of Rhody pride.
Almost no one who goes to a PawSox or P-Bruins game truly cares about whether the home team wins or loses. It's all about the fan experience, the family atmosphere and the fun you can have on a night out with friends at a cost anywhere from 100 to 1,000,000 times more affordable than a night at Fenway, Gillette or the TD Garden.
And now Rhode Islanders will be deprived of summer nights at McCoy Stadium, an older ballpark but hardly one that's falling apart. I'd go as far as calling it a beautiful ballpark, even.
McCoy opened in 1942 and was renovated twice in the '90s to keep up with the times. Get this, wanna know another ballpark in the area that was ancient and needed some renovations to keep up with the times? You know the answer. And the current state of McCoy is nowhere near as downtrodden as Fenway was once upon a time. Using the minor league stadium's age is a major league cop out.
Just how turned off to baseball will this make the state of Rhode Island as it relates to the Red Sox? Burning a whole segment of your fan base doesn't seem like great business.
Is it sacrilegious to even think Rhode Islanders should have every right to gravitate towards another major league team, particularly ones that aren't all that far from here? If I'm the Yankees or Mets, I'm doing everything in my power to convert baseball fans in this region. Pony up the big bucks to get YES and SNY on basic cable and/or sports packages in the area. Yankees games are already simulcast on 790 AM locally. Seeing as how it's the 21st century, there's also the MLB.tv app, if fans wanted to cancel NESN altogether.
One of Lucchino's final acts with the varsity club was the low-ball offer to Jon Lester in the winter of 2013-14, the infamous "hometown discount" deal where Lester was reportedly offered a four-year, $70 million contract extension. You know how that turned out, what with Lester going on to win a World Series with the Cubs and David Price still 0-fer in the postseason as a starter and all. That has very little to do with today's announcement, just something else to consider when it comes to Lucchino.
The lease for the PawSox at McCoy runs through 2020, apparently. Could we have a Simpsons situation where someone pulls a Homer Simpson and goes on hunger strike to prevent the PawSox/Springfield Isotopes from moving to Worcester/Albuquerque?
There's political ramifications for all of this, complete with taxpayers dollars and all of that jazz, but I'll leave to someone smarter and more in tune with how it all works than I am. But pretty much every politician involved, both Democrats and Republicans, should be ashamed of themselves for letting it get to this point. At least there's a second casino coming to Rhode Island that no one asked for.
No matter your thoughts on the political equation, there's no sugarcoating it as a sad day in Rhode Island. Sure, Worcester and Pawtucket are about equidistant to Fenway Park; Worcester is also only about a 45 minute drive from Pawtucket, meaning theoretically, the team is still fairly accessible.
As former Patriots great Chad Ochocinco once said, child please. No one from Rhode Island is going to follow the team to Worcester. Lucchino just burned the second-most densely populated state in America.
Me personally? I'm not from Rhode Island, but I've lived here off and on for nearly a decade now. At the moment, I'm 3 miles from McCoy. And I'd be lying if I said my rooting interests in the Boston Red Sox might wane ever so slightly after today's news. I'm not quite ready to declare free agency, but if so I'm eyeing the Cubs (my late grandmother, a native North Sider, was a big Cubs gal and stunningly, never saw them win a World Series in her 74 years) or the Expos (don't think I won't wait. They're coming back and you know it.)
A colleague of mine once told me that working in sports is the "candy aisle" of news, and that couldn't be more accurate. Except there's no candy left in Rhode Island, because the greed that consumes Larry Lucchino took it all.
In the last calendar year, 95.5 WBRU changed its format to Christian rock, Dan Hurley left for UConn, and now this. Tough times in Rhody, indeed. At least the Narragansett brewery is allegedly on its way back.
P.S. if they actually go by "WooSox" and you are okay with that, I feel sorry for you.
P.P.S Worst Sports Relocations of All-Time, ranked
5. San Diego Chargers to LA
4. Brooklyn Dodgers to LA
3. Hartford Whalers to Carolina
2. Seattle SuperSonics to OKC
1. PawSox to Worcester
No matter your thoughts on the political equation, there's no sugarcoating it as a sad day in Rhode Island. Sure, Worcester and Pawtucket are about equidistant to Fenway Park; Worcester is also only about a 45 minute drive from Pawtucket, meaning theoretically, the team is still fairly accessible.
As former Patriots great Chad Ochocinco once said, child please. No one from Rhode Island is going to follow the team to Worcester. Lucchino just burned the second-most densely populated state in America.
Me personally? I'm not from Rhode Island, but I've lived here off and on for nearly a decade now. At the moment, I'm 3 miles from McCoy. And I'd be lying if I said my rooting interests in the Boston Red Sox might wane ever so slightly after today's news. I'm not quite ready to declare free agency, but if so I'm eyeing the Cubs (my late grandmother, a native North Sider, was a big Cubs gal and stunningly, never saw them win a World Series in her 74 years) or the Expos (don't think I won't wait. They're coming back and you know it.)
A colleague of mine once told me that working in sports is the "candy aisle" of news, and that couldn't be more accurate. Except there's no candy left in Rhode Island, because the greed that consumes Larry Lucchino took it all.
In the last calendar year, 95.5 WBRU changed its format to Christian rock, Dan Hurley left for UConn, and now this. Tough times in Rhody, indeed. At least the Narragansett brewery is allegedly on its way back.
P.S. if they actually go by "WooSox" and you are okay with that, I feel sorry for you.
P.P.S Worst Sports Relocations of All-Time, ranked
5. San Diego Chargers to LA
4. Brooklyn Dodgers to LA
3. Hartford Whalers to Carolina
2. Seattle SuperSonics to OKC
1. PawSox to Worcester
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