Dining in the field
McCoy Stadium when they still played baseball there
— Photo by Meegs
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
On July 24, a bunch of us celebrated a friend’s birthday with dinner at a table in the middle of the field at McCoy Stadium, home of the Pawtucket Red Sox, which of course is decamping for Worcester. The stands have been eerily empty in this COVID-closed season but there were lots of widely separated but fully occupied tables at what has been turned into a very nice reservation-only, open-air restaurant this crazy summer. Luscious lobster- salad sandwiches, by the way. And the birthday girl was honored on the giant screen. I’ve been to McCoy many times but was again surprised by how big it seems for a Minor League team.
It had been a hot day, but a nice breeze over the grass kept us comfortable and then we enjoyed a gorgeous sunset. For some reason, McCoy has superb sunsets.
I felt a pang knowing that professional baseball will probably never again be played at McCoy, which more likely than not will be torn down. We always found a PawSox home game a very nice outing for out-of-towners; foreigners seemed to especially enjoy it.
I’m getting a tour soon of the “WooSox” site, where the Polar Park stadium (named after the Worcester-based seltzer company), is going up; I’ll report back. Will pandemic problems prevent it from opening on schedule next spring?
Maybe some day professional baseball will return to Rhode Island; it certainly has the population density and location to be attractive for a sports team. (I have always thought that the most interesting and dramatic place for a Rhode Island baseball stadium would have been on Bold Point, in East Providence.)
The biggest question may be: How popular will baseball be in coming years compared to other sports? Is it too late to turn McCoy into a soccer stadium?
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The death on July 29 of Lou Schwechheimer from COVID-19 has saddened many people. Lou was the longtime vice president and general manager of the PawSox during the club’s heyday under the ownership of the late Ben Mondor. Lou, working with Mr. Mondor and Mike Tamburro, then the club’s president and now vice chairman, turned the organization into one of the most successful teams in Minor League Baseball.
I encountered Lou many times, and his presence was a tonic. He seemed to have endless supplies of energy, enthusiasm, ingenuity and good humor. He had a memorable capacity for making and keeping friends and boosting the community that the PawSox entertained for so many years.
Llewellyn King: To revive America, fix the gig economy and bring back the WPA
McCoy Stadium, in Pawtucket, R.I., was a WPA project….
…and so was this field House and pump station in Scituate, Mass.
The assumption is that we’ll return to work when COVID-19 is contained, or we have adequate vaccines to deal with it.
That assumption is wrong. For many millions, maybe tens of millions, there will be no work to return to.
At root is a belief that the United States -- and much of the world -- will spring back as it did after the 2008 recession: battered but intact.
Fact is, we won’t. Many of today’s jobs won’t exist anymore. Many small businesses will simply, as the old phrase says, go to the wall. And large ones will be forced to downsize, abandoning marginal endeavors.
When we think of small businesses, we think of franchised shops or restaurants and manufacturers that sell through giants like Amazon and Walmart. But the shrinkage certainly goes further and deeper.
Retailing across the board is in trouble, from the big-box chains to the mom-and-pop clothing stores. The big retailers were reeling well before the coronavirus crisis. Neiman Marcus, an iconic luxury retailer, has filed for bankruptcy. All are hurt, some so much so – especially malls -- that they may be looking to a bleak future.
The supply chain will drive some companies out of business. Small manufacturers may find that their raw material suppliers are no longer there or that the supply chain has collapsed – for example, the clothing manufacturer who can’t get cloth from Italy, dye from Japan or fastenings from China. Over the years, supply chains have become notoriously tight as efficiency has become a business byword.
Some will adapt, some won’t be able to do so. A record 26.5 million Americans have sought unemployment benefits over the past five weeks. Official unemployment numbers have always been on the low side as there’s no way of counting those who’ve given up, those who work in the gray economy, and those who for other reasons, like fear of officialdom or lack of computer skills, haven’t applied for unemployment benefits.
To deal with this situation the government will have to be nimble and imaginative. The idea that the economy will bounce back in a classic V-shape is likely to prove illusory.
The natural response will be for more government handouts. But that won’t solve the systemic problem and will introduce a problem of its own: The dole will build up dependence.
I see two solutions, both of which will require political imagination and fortitude. First, boost the gig economy (contract and casual work) and provide gig workers with the basic structure that formal workers enjoy: Social Security, collective health insurance, unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation. The gig worker, whether cutting lawns, creating Web sites, or driving for a ride-sharing company, should be brought into the established employment fold; they’re employed but differently.
Second, a new Works Progress Administration (WPA) should be created using government and private funding and concentrating on the infrastructure. The WPA, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, ended up employing 8.5 million Americans, out of a total population of 127.3 million, in projects ranging from mural painting to bridge building. Its impact for good was enormous. It fed the hungry with dignity, not the soup kitchen and bread line, and gave America a gift that has kept on giving to this day.
Jarrod Hazelton, a Rhode Island-based economist who’s researched the WPA, says the agency gave us 280,000 miles of repaired roads, almost 30,000 new and repaired bridges, 600 new airports, thousands of new schools, innumerable arts programs, and 24 million planted trees. It also enabled workers to acquire skills and escape the dead-end jobs they’d lost. It was one of the most successful public-private programs in all of history.
As the sea levels rise and the climate deteriorates, we’ll need a WPA, tied in with the Army Corps of Engineers, to help the nation flourish in the decades of challenge ahead. The original was created by FDR with a simple executive order.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail address is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Revolutionary move to Pawtucket?
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary'' in GoLocal24.com
A group of us were talking the other day about the Pawtucket (R.I.) Red Sox’s plan for a multi-recreational-use downtown “Park of Pawtucket’’ at and around a successor stadium of McCoy Stadium. The PawSox organization says it would provide “recreation, entertainment and other amenities year-round,’’ including “concerts, hockey and certain family attractions.’’ Soundsnice, but it’s still hard to see how well this would work without a covered stadium, considering that annual cold snap called “winter’’. The “Park of Pawtucket’’ concept is obviously part of the pitch to get state money to help pay for a McCoy replacement.
Meanwhile, the CEO of GoLocal, Josh Fenton, suggested (in jest?) that the New England Revolution move its base to this new stadium from Gillette Stadium, in Foxboro. Unlike at Gillette, it might often have a chance of filling the stands at a new facility to be shared with the PawSox. Rhode Island, in part because of its large Hispanic and Asian community, loves soccer. And such a move would pull deep-pocketed Robert Kraft, the owner of the Revolution and the New England Patriots, into Rhode Island.
I wonder if the biggest sport in most of the world -- soccer (or "football'' as it's usually called in English-English) -- will ever reach the popularity of that more brutal (brain damage, anyone?) game we call "football'' in the U.S.