Worcester pitches to PawSox

Downtown Worcester.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Worcester officials are quietly reaching out to Pawtucket Red Sox owners about moving the franchise there,  perhaps at the vacant Wyman-Gordon Co. property downtown.  Presumably they’d pitch the old industrial city’s location well within the Boston Red Sox orbit, its slowly reviving downtown and its commuter rail service to and from Greater Boston.

But the Worcester metro area is not on the Main Street of the East Coast, Route 95, as is Pawtucket, and, at 924,000 doesn’t have the population size of the Providence metro area, 1.6 million. And many simply find the Providence area more interesting, or at least more complicated.

Further, however, much  as Worcester officials and downtown business leaders might like to get the PawSox franchise and a stadium to go with it, public support would probably fade if and when the PawSox made their formal proposals for aid from the state and the city, especially if  state and local tax revenues fall over the next few months. And foes would cite  as warning the infamous cost overruns and other hassles in the construction of Dunkin’ Donuts Park in fiscally sick Hartford, the home of the hideously named Hartford Yard Goats, a Colorado Rockies farm team. Building baseball stadiums is not for the faint of heart!

Anyway, the PawSox owners clearly want to stay in Pawtucket.