PAWTUCKET – Tradition and baseball are two things East Providence City Council President Robert P. Rodericks fully understands and appreciates.
Rodericks’ son, Bobby, leads the city’s high school baseball team as its head coach, with the Townies now playing their home games every spring at the newly built East Providence High School. Rodericks regularly attends games at the new field, complete with new dugouts, fencing and an artificial field turf surface, to watch East Providence vie for state championships.
But watching games at the new field, part of the city’s $189.5 million school construction project, has been challenging. The only fixed bleacher seating was along the foul lines, Rodericks told Providence Business News, and parents had to bring their own seats to sit close behind home plate for games.
“People, parents and others like to sit close to the game and they want to see the game,” Rodericks said. “People were bringing beach towels, chairs, sitting on the grass behind the backstop area.”
So, Rodericks reached out to the nearby city of Pawtucket to Mayor Donald R. Grebien to see if East Providence’s neighbor could provide something for the new school on Pawtucket Avenue. The result: East Providence High School’s baseball field will soon include a piece of Rhode Island baseball history.
East Providence is one of at least two communities in the Ocean State that will receive donated rows of seats from McCoy Stadium, preserving part the historic 82-year-old stadium that will soon be history. The longtime home of the former Pawtucket Red Sox on Columbus Avenue is
set to be demolished to make way for
a new $330 million combined high school to replace the aging Charles E. Shea and William E. Tolman high schools.
[caption id="attachment_490220" align="alignright" width="456"]
THE BASEBALL FIELD at East Providence High School is being prepped for installation of donated rows of seats from McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket. / COURTESY EAST PROVIDENCE MAYOR ROBERTO L. "BOB" DASILVA[/caption]
The donations of seats from McCoy come eight months after the city of Pawtucket held a
McCoy memorabilia auction on July 15. That auction, which sold signage, banners and rows of seats displayed at the stadium,
raised approximately $48,000 for local charities.
Receiving the seats from McCoy for free saved the city of East Providence on significant construction costs to install them at the baseball field. Rodericks said it would have cost the city up to $50,000 if they bought new seats on the market.
Now, coupled with East Providence Mayor Roberto L. “Bob” DaSilva keeping his word that the city will install the seats, according to Rodericks, baseball fans in East Providence will soon watch the sport in seats from a stadium that hosted the game for more than eight decades.
“It’s a combination of providing seating for fans and bringing a little bit of history to East Providence from McCoy Stadium,” Rodericks said. “We are very steeped in tradition in East Providence. We still have members of our baseball teams from decades ago still come to our games. To keep that spirit alive of the Pawtucket Red Sox alive … it would be kind of cool to sit on the original seats from McCoy.”
The city of Cranston also received from the city of Pawtucket four rows of seats from McCoy, which will be installed at the Peter Pastore Youth Center – the city’s parks and recreation headquarters – on Gansett Avenue. Pastore Youth Center is home to the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams from Bain Middle School.
In a statement to PBN, Cranston Mayor Kenneth J. Hopkins said the McCoy seats will not only serve as a “tangible connection” to the stadium’s history and memories made there, but will also inspire future generations of Cranston athletes to “engage with the sport and appreciate the sense of community it fosters.”
“This gesture symbolizes the enduring bond between the cities of our state, and our shared love for the game,” Hopkins said.
Pawtucket city spokesperson Grace Voll also told PBN that some rows of seats from McCoy will be placed inside the state archive located at the R.I. Secretary of State’s office in Providence. There will also be a row of seats from McCoy installed at the new 10,500-seat stadium at Tidewater Landing, home of Rhode Island FC, that is set to open May 3, Voll said.
Plus, Voll said the Pawtucket School Department requested the city to keep three full sections of seats from McCoy, which “a lot of those seats” will be incorporated into the new high school. Voll also said the city of Pawtucket had offered local organizations within Warwick and Seekonk if they wanted seats from McCoy, but it is unclear if those organizations accepted those offers.
Demolition preparation work has begun at McCoy, Voll said, with public access to the stadium closing last month. Voll said the city has scheduled a formal groundbreaking ceremony for the new high school on April 10, with demolition of McCoy starting “sometime that week.”
Rodericks admitted it is bittersweet to see McCoy get demolished, even though it will be for a new state-of-the-art high school. He feels the PawSox, which moved to Worcester, Mass., in 2021 after team and state leaders at the time failed to agree on a new stadium plan in Rhode Island, leaving the Ocean State after 50 years was “a mistake.” Rodericks said McCoy may have needed some work but still had between 8,000 and 10,000 fans attending PawSox games regularly, which, he said, “was not bad for Triple-A baseball.”
However, elements of McCoy being spread around the state, including in East Providence, can help preserve its history for future generations, Rodericks said.
“[McCoy] meant a lot to Rhode Islanders,” he said.
James Bessette is the PBN special projects editor, and also covers the nonprofit and education sectors. You may reach him at Bessette@PBN.com. You may also follow him on X at @James_Bessette.
