PawSox to WooSox? Sure! But without public funding
Victor Matheson, economics professor at The College of the Holy Cross
Earlier this year, the Worcester Sharks announced they would leave the DCU Center for California. With the hockey team's departure, Worcester is without a professional sports franchise for the first time in over 20 years. At the same time, the Pawtucket Red Sox, Boston's AAA affiliate, announced they want to leave 70-year-old McCoy Stadium for greener — and certainly newer — pastures. Could Worcester be the new home?
Worcester is the 4th-largest metropolitan area in the United States that does not have at least one professional sports franchise (behind Honolulu; Tucson, Ariz. and New Haven, Conn.). That makes it an attractive site for a minor league club. One can certainly imagine the thrill of enjoying high-level professional baseball on a beautiful New England night here.
Unfortunately, while the heart says “yes” to minor league baseball, the mind, especially the pocketbook, should be firmly saying “no.”
The biggest hurdle to attracting a high-level minor league team to Worcester is a stadium. An AAA-level club would require a modern 10,000-seat facility, which you cannot find in the area. Fitton Field at Holy Cross, home of the Worcester Bravehearts of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League, holds just 3,000, and no other facility in Worcester can even match that figure.
That means a new stadium would have to be built, and even minor league stadiums are expensive undertakings today. The new stadium proposed for the PawSox on the Providence riverfront carries an $85 million price tag. Meanwhile, new AAA stadiums that opened in the past year in El Paso, Texas; Charlotte, N.C. and Nashville have averaged more than $55 million in construction costs alone. In most cases, local taxpayers are expected to cover a large portion of the costs. For the Providence stadium, the owners' initial request was that the team be given public land at no cost, that the stadium receive a 30-year property tax exemption, and that the city cover $4 million in annual debt payments for that same period, an amount sufficient to pay for roughly three-quarters of the construction costs.
The economic benefits from a minor league baseball team rarely justify these costs. While baseball's boosters would claim that a team would bring in 700,000 fans per year into Worcester, that figure isn't much different from the annual number of customers at a typical large multiplex movie theater. Yet, no one would consider subsidizing millions of dollars for something of that nature. Furthermore, most minor league baseball fans are drawn from the local region, meaning that money spent at the stadium is money that would have otherwise been spent elsewhere in the local economy.
Relocating the PawSox to Worcester would provide a nice amenity for the city, and we should welcome the team with open arms. But the city should keep its wallet closed.
Victor Matheson, a professor of economics and accounting at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, teaches sports economics.
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