WORCESTER—The best ballpark in Triple-A baseball does not have a birth certificate, nor does its tenant.
Polar Park, home of the Worcester Red Sox, was conceived through years, even decades, of discussions over coffee and danish, between gulps from mugs of foamy draft beer, over phone calls, letters, emails and text messages.
However, the team and the ballpark have what can reasonably be considered a birthplace. It is 16 Kelley Square, Worcester, site of the venerable Hotel Vernon and more specifically its Ship Room.
The Ship Room was the place where, on the evening of Nov. 5, 2015, the Canal District Alliance voted to formally invite Larry Lucchino to move his Pawtucket Red Sox here.
It is coming up on nine years since that seed was officially planted. Video journalist Tom Catlin, a documentarian based in San Diego, is assembling a production that chronicles the unlikely story of this city landing one of the best franchises in Triple-A baseball.
He visited the Ship Room Tuesday as part of his research.
Catlin is the producer. WooSox president Charles Steinberg is the executive producer. The two have worked together in the past, both in San Diego and Boston. Catlin makes monthly visits here to work on the story and was in town this week.
The documentary is scheduled to be finished some time in 2025.
“Dr. Charles always likes to be the one to tell the team story,” Catlin said inside the hotel, “and believed that — we need to document this story, the highly unlikely outcome of what was Pawtucket’s attempt to build a new ballpark.”
The official invitation to invite the PawSox to move happened after a story this reporter wrote while working for the Telegram & Gazette. It was the result of an interview with Lucchino. He spoke in the aftermath of some failed negotiations with the state of Rhode Island over building a ballpark to replace outdated McCoy Stadium.
Mullen Sawyer, then head of the Canal District Alliance, invited me to a meeting where the group might come up with a plan to get the team to the Canal District. The goal was to build a ballpark on the vacant Wyman-Gordon land. That did not happen. It turned out the PawSox liked a site across Madison Street even better.
Bob Largess, a member of the Canal District Alliance, hosted the group’s meetings in the Ship Room and remembers this one well.
“You had told us,” he said, “that things weren’t going well in Rhode Island and to this point, nobody else had approached Pawtucket and this was our chance. So, at the meeting, I made a motion to get the PawSox to move, we got a second and it was passed.
“Then you said, ‘this is front page news, I have to go write.”
As a group, Largess recalled, everybody was a bit skeptical.
“The feeling was, well, OK, maybe he’s right and we hope so.”
It turned out to be major sports news. The next day, National Public Radio picked it up and reported that the Alliance had begun negotiating with the PawSox.
“Well, no, we didn’t say that,” Largess recalled, “but the phone calls started coming in. We got ‘em from the Mayor, from everyone else, and the politics started getting involved.”
As it turned out, the Alliance had done its job. The only headline left was about Gene Zabinski’s postcard campaign. That was an ongoing story, not breaking news.
The WooSox’ move here is not the only piece of baseball history connected with the Ship Room. One floor below, in the hotel basement, are the remnants of a speakeasy — the bar, even — where Babe Ruth used to drink on his trips to the city. Those were usually to visit his former Red Sox teammate and manager Jack Barry.
One wall of the Ship Room is dominated by an ancient steering wheel from the Hoboken Ferry. There is no way to document this, but the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J. were the site of many historic baseball games before the Civil War.
It has been written that today’s ballparks are descended from the Elysian Fields. Those games were generally played by, and watched by, people who took the Hoboken Ferry over from New York City, perhaps on a boat with the Ship Room wheel.
In the nine years since the Alliance met to invite the PawSox here, the Worcester Red Sox have sold nearly 2 million tickets in four seasons, played 551 games and graduated 36 players to the major leagues.
Kelley Square has gone from being a circle to a peanut, thousands of mugs of draft beer have been drained, and hundreds of events have been held or planned in the Hotel Vernon.
At least one of those events will be immortalized in a baseball documentary.
“I’m absolutely thrilled with how it turned out,” Largess said. “I can’t imagine it, but it has been beyond our, beyond Worcester’s, wildest dreams.”
And it all began with a motion from the floor, and a second.
Bill Ballou covered the Red Sox for the Worcester Telegram from 1997 through 2018. He has covered pro hockey in Worcester since 1994 and currently does a weekly column for the Worcester Red Sox. Ballou can be reached at vetgoalie@aol.com
