Pawtucket Red Sox fans are crushed that their team will be leaving town in two years. Rhode Island politicians are straining fingers pointing and blaming each other. The ball club’s chairman says all he is doing is moving to a city and state that want him.
Okay, now that everybody hereabouts has had the weekend to vent and bemoan the loss of the PawSox, can we all take a deep breath and accept the fact that in the end money lured the organization to Worcester?
In the end, this was about the business of baseball, not the game of baseball. Worcester and Massachusetts offered a better pitch than Pawtucket and Rhode Island, which wasn’t difficult given the terms House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello pushed through the Rhode Island General Assembly. Compare the numbers:
Team Contribution: Pawtucket $45 million, $12 million in equity; Worcester $30 million, $6 million in equity.
City Contribution: Pawtucket $15 million; Worcester $70 million.
State Contribution: Rhode Island $23 million bond; Massachusetts $35 million infrastructure grant.
The PawSox could have lived with those figures but not the additional millions in carrying costs that would have resulted after Mattiello stripped any state guarantee from the finance package,.
If the PawSox were your team, which proposal would you accept? I’d sign with Worcester before the folks up there had a chance to change their mind if they find the proposed stadium site is a brownfield or begin to doubt that economic development will follow the construction of a 10,000-seat ball park.
Keep in mind that we would not be talking about a move to Worcester had Rhode Island politicians and bureaucrats not rolled out a $75-million welcome mat to Curt Schilling and his 38 Studios video game company in 2010. Their failure two years later ultimately cost the state $28 million, made a skeptical public even more skittish, and paralyzed too many politicians and citizens alike when it comes to future public-private partnerships.
If Rhode Island leaders at the time had followed Massachusetts’s lead and said no thank you, or if Schilling’s venture had succeeded, I guarantee you that a publicly financed stadium would be rising in downtown Providence or downtown Pawtucket now.
But they didn’t, and we are dealing with the fallout. Opponents to any stadium deal involving public funds conveniently forgot that in 1999 state bonds enabled a $17-million renovation of McCoy Stadium, home of the PawSox, and that a public-private partnership already exists. They forgot that the state invested in the Rhode Island Convention Center and bought and enhanced the Providence Civic Center. That complex has been a boon to Providence and Rhode Island. They forgot that the Pawtucket Red Sox, saved from extinction by the late, great Ben Mondor in 1977, have been around for 40 years and are part of the fabric of Pawtucket and Rhode Island. They forgot that public funds pay for airports and seaports that private entities use to do business.
If the PawSox really do leave – nothing is certain until Polar Park arises in Worcester’s Kelly Square – there will be enough blame here at home to go around. The PawSox’s new ownership group, spearheaded by the late Jim Skeffington, badly misjudged the public response to their 2015 proposal for an $85-million stadium in Providence to be built with $68 million in state money. After Skeffington’s death that May, Lucchino took over and by 2017 had put forth a new proposal for an $83-million stadium in downtown Pawtucket, with the club to invest $45 million, or 54 percent, unheard of in minor-league baseball. But they failed to sell the stadium as an asset to the community as well as the ball club, and opponents pushed back hard.
Except for the Pawtucket delegation, state politicians were slow to back the project. Many rejected it outright. Gov. Gina Raimondo offered lukewarm support. Mattiello flip-flopped from positive to negative when a poll showed that his constituents were negative. Last January, after a series of public hearing throughout the state, the Senate passed a finance package that all but Mattiello supported. Wielding his power, he stonewalled the process for six months, until the final hours of the legislative session, possibly saving his seat in the House but losing 10,000 seats at McCoy because by then Lucchino and his team, frustrated by their experience on Smith Hill, had all but sealed the deal with Worcester.
In the wake of the August 17 announcement, critics have said the PawSox should have demonstrated more loyalty to Pawtucket and Rhode Island. Even the once-great Providence Journal editorialized on Tuesday “PawSox snub their loyal fans”.
Really? The PawSox have been loyal to Rhode Island for more than four decades. When it came time for reciprocity, where was the loyalty from our state’s supposed leaders? In this business of baseball, they struck out.
