by Dan Barry
By 1961, the stadium was all but abandoned, entrances and ticket windows boarded up, walls defaced with graffiti that said, in effect, no game today. Vandals had busted the lights, damaged the sound system, and punched holes in the ceiling to expose girders and steel rods to the elements. Rust covered the grandstand’s seats and railings. The stadium had become headquarters for the city’s highway department: a storage facility, really, for trucks and heavy equipment, piles of paving blocks and mounds and mounds of salt and sand. Just twenty years after the city proudly held a “Laying of Cornerstone” ceremony, where a band played, and people cheered, and the mayor read aloud a letter dedicating this playland to the enjoyment of Pawtucket “for all eternity,” the stadium had become, in the estimation of the Pawtucket Evening Times, a “shameful eyesore.”
Still, in fits and starts, professional baseball returned to McCoy, as though willed by the mayoral specter sitting in his box seat, waiting to throw out the first phantom pitch. In the mid-1960s, a Double-A team for the Cleveland Indians called the Pawtucket Indians briefly played before small crowds more interested in the future stars of the Boston Red Sox than in those of an American League rival. Of what little is remembered from those two Indians years, there lingers the story of a Pawtucket player sliding into second base and mysteriously slicing his leg. After the game, he and his teammates returned to the infield to investigate, and there, near second base, they unearthed the culprit: an old hubcap—a remnant, perhaps, of one of the vehicles supposedly swallowed by the swamp decades earlier.
Then, in 1970, a team called the Pawtucket Red Sox was created. A Double-A franchise at first, it joined the Triple-A International League in 1973. Its owner, Joe Buzas, the acknowledged king of minor-league baseball, had saved dozens of teams across the country, sometimes buying and flipping them like so much real estate. A former major-league shortstop (30 games with the 1945 New York Yankees), he routinely introduced himself with a feigned jab, as if to test your boxing mettle. He was a crusty, bighearted adherent to the old school, which meant that he was legendarily tight, and would have saved the shells of shucked peanuts if he could find a use for them. Whenever his Pawtucket team ended a home stand, for example, he would pack up the unsold boxes of popcorn into his car and drive 120 miles to sell them at the home stand of the team he owned in Bristol, Connecticut. And after every game, he had that kid who was always hanging around, that Hood, gather up the used baseballs and feed them into a strange, octagonal box filled with erasers that, with turns of a crank, would scrub the balls almost clean, so that they could be recycled as “new” for the next game.
In 1975, after two years of losing money, Buzas sold the team to Phil Anez, an ambitious advertising executive from Woonsocket with a rock-star haircut and a fondness for the track. Using a $10,000 loan from his grandfather and a much larger loan from the Small Business Administration, he bet all he had on the Pawtucket Red Sox, and talked excitedly of his many ideas for making the team profitable. But such naïve exuberance can be skeptically received in a hard-knock, insecure place like Pawtucket. When Anez was introduced as the team’s new owner to the mayor of Pawtucket, His Honor’s first question was not a pleasant how-do-you-do, but a distrusting: “When are you moving the team out of Pawtucket?” Anez insisted that he had no such plans, thus providing the first public indication that he may not have entirely known what he was getting into. The second came when he shared with New England the news that he was, at heart, a New York Yankees fan.
Anez improved the concession stands at McCoy, launched a blitz of special nights and promotions, bought “Charlie Finley type multicolored uniforms” of scarlet and blue for the ballplayers, and hired usherettes to, as he put it, “give a little glamour and beauty to the ballpark.” He also named a sixteen-year-old girl from Lincoln as Miss Pawtucket Red Sox, whose duties, according to the Providence Journal, were to “sweep the bases, bring refreshments to the umpires and provide a general focus of attention.” However off-putting it might have been to use a teenage girl as a “focus of attention” on a baseball diamond, Anez was at least correct in sensing a need for distraction from the poor quality of the baseball being played. The Pawtucket team lost 87 games and won just 53 that season, an appalling record that was punctuated by one last public-relations gaffe. With only a few games left to play, the team’s two batboys—Eddy, thirteen, and Larry, fourteen, both being raised by single mothers—quit after learning that they would not be compensated for their season’s work. By the time Anez agreed to pay the boys a couple of hundred dollars each, on advice of counsel and the state Department of Labor, he had become the villain in a national story line worthy of Horatio Alger: The Fatherless Batboys of Pawtucket.
Anez began to panic. City Hall refused to help repair the broken stadium, and the talent he wanted from the Red Sox organization to fill its seats never came. Believing that he could broaden his fan base with a change in nomenclature, Anez rechristened the team the Rhode Island Red Sox—the RISox—“in honor of the many fans who made 1975 the tremendous success it was.” But by removing “Pawtucket” from the name, of course, he effectively separated the team from its home, alienating everyone from the mayor in city hall to the maintenance crew raking the field. He also capitalized on the bicentennial year by selling season tickets at $19 for children and $76 for adults, and trotted out every gimmick and come-on in the worn playbook of struggling minor-league franchises. A safecracking contest. Another visit from Max Patkin, the Baseball Clown. Ten-cent Beer Night (“Wasn’t pretty,” Hood will recall). Win A Jalopy Night, in which some lucky fan won an old heap in need of a new motor. Win A Pony Night, in which the sight of a miniature pony being trotted onto the field had every parent in the stadium praying not to be in possession of the winning ticket. (Joe Morgan, the manager, will remember the time “a little girl won it, and her old man didn’t want her to take it, naturally, and she was crying….”) Each promotion signaled the desperation of a cash-strapped operation in search of an identity. Sometimes, it seemed that McCoy had devolved into the place to go if you wanted to throw food, drink to excess, and take your life’s frustrations out on the players and umpires on the field, thus saving money you might otherwise have spent on psychotherapy.
The ballplayers could sense that things were not quite right. Jack Baker, the team’s powerful first baseman, whose nickname—“Home Run”—pretty much says it all, will remember two off-field moments above all others. That time in Charleston, West Virginia, when deputy sheriffs effectively impounded the bus and the team by preventing them from driving away—apparently because the team hadn’t paid its Charleston hotel bill in many months. And the time when the team participated in “Rhode Island Red Sox Night” at the dog track in Lincoln, and Baker and a dozen other players were paraded onto the track between races, as if the Black Sox scandal of 1919 had never happened, as if baseball and gambling went together like apple pie and ice cream.
The bicentennial season ended in another losing season, both in the standings and at the box office, and the Pawtucket Red Sox—make that the Rhode Island Red Sox—seemed on the verge of folding up or leaving town, like so many of the mills once within walking distance of its ticket window. After revealing that he had lost money and could not stomach any more jalopy and pony giveaways, Anez announced plans to move the franchise to Jersey City, which did not seem particularly interested in receiving it. Meanwhile, the International League was demanding that he pay several outstanding bills for bats and balls and other baseball supplies. He asked for more time, but made it clear that he wasn’t going to throw good money after bad. Fed up, the International League stripped Anez of the franchise. He would leave the stadium, for the last time, in tears.
Although Anez always felt forsaken by the Boston Red Sox and the City of Pawtucket, he would tell anyone who listened that he accepted responsibility for his failure, citing as his biggest mistake the decision to remove “Pawtucket” from the team’s name. He would file for bank-ruptcy. His marriage would
break up. He would avoid any circumstance in which he might hear or see the phrase “Pawtucket Red Sox,” going so far as to cancel his subscription to the Providence Journal. And he would never again set foot in McCoy Stadium: too painful.
More than thirty years later, Phil Anez will say, with voice breaking: “I still think about it every single day.”
After banishing Anez, the International League awarded the franchise to a Massachusetts businessman, who instantly compounded problems by announcing plans to move the team to Worcester. No, you’re not, the drama-weary league said, and ended the negotiations. Now it was January 1977, and both the International League and the Boston Red Sox were in a bind; with Opening Day just three months away, they had no one in charge in Pawtucket. But a man with ties to both worlds, a Pawtucket bank executive and former Red Sox pitcher named Chet Nichols, knew someone who might solve all their worries, a real character with deep pockets named Ben Mondor. It was a hard sell, though. His first of many conversations with Mondor on the subject began this way.
Nichols: So, how would you like to buy a baseball team?
Mondor: How would you like to go play in traffic?
In truth, the thought rather intrigued the retired, somewhat bored millionaire. While he had not forgotten his impressions of McCoy upon attending a PawSox game a couple of years earlier—What a dump—Mondor was drawn to the challenge, to the potential story line of: Once-poor kid from Woonsocket saves the game of baseball. Several meetings with Red Sox executives in Boston went smoothly enough, but when Mondor asked to see the books, as a good businessman should, he discovered that the Pawtucket Red Sox franchise was in hock for hundreds of thousands of dollars to the beer distributors, the food vendors, the newspapers, the telephone company. Having no desire to inherit someone else’s debt, Mondor said no, thank you, gentlemen, and the best of luck to you.
Desperate to win him over, baseball executives concocted an elaborate, smoke-and-mirrors swap on paper that effectively sent the debt-ridden Pawtucket franchise to the Canadian hinterlands, never to be found, and replaced it with a clean, unencumbered franchise that could be presented to Mondor as a virginal enterprise. After some additional haggling, he accepted the terms, and the challenge. His first order of business: Hire an assistant who knew the ins and outs of the baseball business, because he sure as hell didn’t.
On an icy, late-January day in 1977, Mondor arranged to have lunch with Mike Tamburro, a tall, earnest young man with a curl of brown hair that looped over the center of his forehead. Tamburro was only twenty-four, but he had already served two years as the general manager of Boston’s Single-A team in Elmira, in western New York. He had a reputation for working as long as it took to get things done, an ethic he developed as a boy, peeling potatoes and washing dishes at his family’s Italian restaurant outside Worcester. The Red Sox front office thought highly of him, and knew of his strong desire to return to New England, made clear by his constant inquiries into the travails of the Pawtucket franchise.
The two men met at the To Kalon Club, an august, white-linen Pawtucket establishment that Mondor had chosen to impress the young man. For decades the TK Club—whose Greek name means “the beautiful”—had been the preferred social refuge of mill owners, bankers, and other masters of the Blackstone Valley universe. Local lore had it that to understand the power endowed in the club, you need only take a drive on Interstate 95, just outside its doors. The highway follows a relatively straight line from Florida to Maine, save for the dangerous shimmy it performs in Pawtucket, swerving this way and that as if to avoid plowing right through the almighty TK. But now, with textile businesses closing and a disturbing pall settling over the downtown, the club was losing the beauty promised in its name and maintained by money. A musty scent was creeping into its pool room, its bowling alley, into the hand-painted scenes of country squires on horseback that adorned some of its walls. Still, surrounded by these remnants of privilege not known to their immigrant forebears, Mondor and Tamburro found common ground: on the importance of the Catholic faith in their lives; in the embrace of hard work; and in the recognition that the success of the Pawtucket Red Sox hinged on returning to McCoy Stadium a sense of wholesome respect for baseball. No more base-sweeping usherettes. No more ponies. And forget this Rhode Island Red Sox nonsense. We’re in Pawtucket, so the Pawtucket Red Sox it is.
Even before the check for lunch arrived, the two men knew that they would soon be spending a lot of time with each other. They took the short ride to their new workplace, walking up to the stadium’s open concourse, and immediately felt the panic of doubt. The stadium was like a concrete refuse bin, with cups and paper and garbage from the last game of last season, five months ago, strewn everywhere. Silenced by the scene, and with the echoing click-clack of their shoes the only noise, the men passed the Kentucky Fried Chicken concession stand, where chicken bones were frozen into the ice puddles on the floor. Mondor slipped on the mess and slammed to the ground, flat on his back. As Tamburro rushed over, the millionaire looked up at his only employee and said: Son, every businessman makes a classic mistake in his life. This better not be mine.
Mondor got up off the floor, with only his pride hurt. Then the two men walked down to the office area, which, of course, had been cleaned out. Not even a paper clip.
With Opening Day just two months away, the new owner and his enthusiastic aide had to build a baseball enterprise from nearly nothing, a challenge made doubly difficult by his predecessor’s parting gift of assorted unpaid bills. In New England, the phrase “Red Sox” is the not-so-secret password to everything; it opens doors, ensures certain considerations, spreads goodwill. But Mondor and Tamburro soon learned that the mere addition of one word, “Pawtucket,” changed the magical phrase into a door-slamming epithet. Mondor tried to explain to the team’s traditional vendors that he had no connection to the old franchise. Though he was not responsible for its debts, he was a self-made multimillionaire, honorable, a good risk. But many businesses did not care. One day, Mondor and Tamburro went shopping at the E. L. Freeman stationery store on Newport Avenue for pens, pads, and other essential office supplies. They wheeled their cart to the checkout line and asked to set up a long-term account. But when the manager learned that they were from the Pawtucket Red Sox, he asked them to leave the store—the team owed him $2,500, and he had no desire to do any further business with them. The millionaire and his assistant left their crammed shopping cart at the counter and walked out.
It seemed that every affected business saw only the red in Pawtucket Red Sox. When Mondor placed a routine order for International League baseballs with the sports-equipment vendor, for example, he was refused. Once the vendor found out that the Syracuse Chiefs were thinking of supplying enough balls to tide Pawtucket over, it threatened to cut off Syracuse as well. In the end, Mondor was forced to threaten court action in order to secure the God-given right to buy baseballs.
The two men promised dozens of irate fans that they would make good on all the tickets that the previous owner sold in advance for playoff games never played, as well as all those two-year season ticket packages for which the new owners never saw a dime. They molli-fied their vendors by paying their bills in advance of the season, with Mondor writing large checks to create pay-as-you-go accounts with the popcorn supplier, the peanut supplier, the supplier of souvenirs and trinkets. They received dozens of slightly used Red Sox uniforms from Boston to replace the Pawtucket uniforms that were nowhere to be found in the clubhouse, and arranged with a manufacturer in North Carolina to have a shipment of baseball caps sent two weeks before Opening Day.
Two weeks before Opening Day: no caps.
One week before: no caps.
The night before: no caps.
Seeing no other choice, a frantic Tamburro raced to the Sears department store on North Main Street and bought up its complement of cheap Boston Red Sox hats. Of course, the next day, on the afternoon of Opening Day, April 15, 1977, a few hours before game time, the shipment
of baseball caps arrived, by bus. Of course.
The new management assigned a regiment of ushers, Pawtucket police officers, and Pinkerton guards to bum-rush to South Bend Street anyone under the misapprehension that McCoy Stadium still tolerated drunks pelting people with mustard and relish. Those who were thrown out for rowdy behavior—over the weekend, several dozen would be shown the door—could have saved themselves some embarrassment had they spent fifty cents to buy the official 1977 Pawtucket Red Sox program before engaging in their clownishness. For there, on the first page, appeared an open letter from the team president, Ben Mondor. It was a contract, really, stipulating an end to thirty-five years of uncertainty and embarrassment, hooligans and beer fests, ponies and jalopies and silliness.
“Welcome!” the letter began. “The circus tent at McCoy Stadium has come down one last time.”
Now, four years after Mondor wrote that Opening Day manifesto, few in Rhode Island dispute that he has kept his word. With the help of Mike Tamburro and Lou Schwechheimer, another tireless young addition to the front office, he has gradually turned an all-but-bankrupt team, playing in an all-but-abandoned ballpark, into a southern New England attraction that is, dare they say it, profitable. The men have stuck to a plan that embraces the surrounding working-class milieu: keep the prices low, make the stadium safe and family-friendly, and emphasize that the Pawtucket players on the field are the Boston Red Sox stars of tomorrow. The place should be about baseball at its diverting, aspiring best—and the fans apparently agreed. In 1977, Mondor’s first year as the owner, the Pawtucket Red Sox had a paid attendance of 111,000 fans; by last year, in 1980, the team had nearly doubled that figure.