Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is a hard luck town. And late last week, its luck got even worse.
On Friday, the Pawtucket Red Sox (known to everyone as the “PawSox”), the AAA affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, announced their departure to Worcester, Massachusetts. Initially a AA team, the PawSox have played in Pawtucket since their inception in 1969.
Rhode Island, despite its diminutive size, is really two states in one: In the the prosperous coastal towns like Newport, Jamestown, and East Greenwich, “summer” is a verb and the economy revolves around boats and the beach. But the northern, inland part of the state is firmly Rust Belt, characterized by formerly heavily industrial cities now strewn with abandoned warehouses and empty factories.
Pawtucket is firmly in the latter camp. Home to the first fully mechanized cotton-spinning mill in America, the city was once an important economic hub, centered on textiles and iron work. But decline has been long, tough, and unrelenting.
First the textile businesses migrated south. Then the domestic iron industry declined. Local businesses soon followed. When in the 1990s David Mamet was looking for a suitably depressing city to shoot his story of small town crooks, American Buffalo, he chose Pawtucket. (While shooting the film, Dustin Hoffman commuted: He stayed in a house in nearby Providence.)
The PawSox, a beloved local franchise, have long been a source of pride—and economic sustenance. They play at McCoy Stadium, a 70-year-old relic, drawing more than 600,000 spectators a season. (McCoy was home to the longest professional baseball game ever played: a 33-inning contest in 1981 between the PawSox and the Rochester Red Wings. The game, like a cricket match, was completed over two days.)
But the PawSox owners announced that the next two years they play at McCoy will be their last. Roughly three years ago, they announced their plans to vacate McCoy. Pawtucket, Providence, and Worcester jockeyed for position. The owners played the competitors against each other masterfully, and in the end, Worcester evidently made the team an offer it couldn’t refuse: It will build a new $90 million stadium and apartment complex. The state of Massachusetts is fronting $35 million; and “the city of Worcester is expected to borrow $100 million, some of which would be repaid by the team,” the Providence CBS affiliate reported. The deal required no input from the state legislature, and was put together in secret. The only apparent cost to the PawSox is that they will now known by the unfortunate moniker “WooSox.”
For his part, the PawSox chairman said he was glad to be moving “somewhere you are wanted, not where there is controversy and opposition.” In other words, Rhode Island drove a harder bargain than its neighbor to the north.
Earlier this year, the Rhode Island Senate passed a bill that “would have required the team to pay $45 million ($12 million of that in equity), the state $32 million and (Pawtucket) $15 million,” the Providence Journal reported. That’s significantly more than the team’s ownership will have to put up in Worcester. Moreover, that Senate bill never even passed the House. Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo is blaming the legislative ball-dropping for the PawSox departure. She says that the “legislature dragged their feet for over a year,” allowing Worcester to swoop in and grab the team. Raimondo, a centrist Democrat, is unpopular and facing a tough r-eelection battle this fall: The loss of the PawSox will only hurt her effort to secure a second term.
But it’s the city of Pawtucket who will feel the PawSox’s departure most acutely. Pawtucket’s plan had been for a new stadium to be built on the site of a vacant department store. Now that massive, empty hulk not only stands a reminder of the demise of a local retail icon, but also the city’s loss of a source of immense civic pride.
