The icy reminder of a baseball truth has blown down from New England, down from a Rhode Island city forever described as gritty, or struggling, or, more politely, challenged. No doubt you have seen signs for this brown-brick metropolis along the interstate, on your way to someplace else: Pawtucket, population 71,000.
Home of the historic Slater Mill, once a vital cog in the Industrial Revolution and now an obligatory class-trip destination. Home of the China Inn, the Modern Diner and the Irish Social Club; mention my name and they’ll charge you double. Home of McCoy Stadium.
Now Pawtucket is also home to this familiar lesson: Beyond the game’s innate poetry, which has seduced generations of hacks to summon their inner Whitman for every slam-bam double play, professional baseball is a cold business, as emotional at its core as an expectorated spray of tobacco juice.
On Monday morning, a group of high-powered investors announced their purchase of the Pawtucket Red Sox, the Class AAA franchise of the Boston Red Sox, as well as their plans to build a shiny bauble of a stadium for the International League team in downtown Providence, the capital city just south of Pawtucket — but not Pawtucket.
During a news conference in Providence — and not Pawtucket — the new owners indicated their intentions to abandon McCoy Stadium in the next few years. Even if their hopes for a waterfront stadium in Providence should fail, the implication was: This great Red Sox Nation of ours covers a lot of New England turf.
“Our sense is that if the state wants us here, it should be the Rhode Island Red Sox,” one of the lead investors, a lawyer named Jim Skeffington, told The Providence Journal. “We’re all Rhode Islanders.”
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Baseball is a business. The Red Sox have to do what is best, and most profitable, for the future of their organization. The “nation” expects no less.
But the next time you’re driving along I-95 in spring or summer, exit in Pawtucket. Risk the five minutes it takes to reach McCoy. Enjoy the free parking. Splurge for a $13 box seat. And buy the ghost beside you a beer, before all of this slips into the sinkhole of memory.
Dan Barry is the author of “Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game” (Harper, 2011), an account of the 1981 minor league game in Pawtucket that began in April and concluded in June.
A version of this article appears in print on February 25, 2015, on page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: A City Braces for Its Ballpark To Go the Way of Its Mills . Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
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