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WooSox’s Polar Park Opening Day: Janet Marie Smith and Larry Lucchino revel in the success of another ballpark project
Updated 9:21 AM;
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WORCESTER As she walked around an impromptu cast party of sorts after Polar Park’s Opening Night drew rave reviews, Janet Marie Smith reveled in a moment she helped create.
Smith’s work designing and renovating some of baseball’s legendary ballparks has given her a level of fame few architects achieve and might someday land her in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Her partnership with Larry Lucchino, now the chairman and part-owner of the Worcester Red Sox, has changed baseball.
It was a VIBP day Very Important BallPark.
Where to begin with the list of notables the Worcester Red Sox attracted for the home opener, the inaugural game at Polar Park?
How about Joe Torre, great player and manager, now a special assistant to the Commissioner of Baseball?
“It’s a beautiful ballpark,” he said. “I was walking in with Peter Woodfork, who works for MLB in the minor league systems, and I said this is a far cry from Eau Claire (Wisconsin) when I played there in 1960. We had a nail on the wall you’ve heard that story a million times. I mean, you couldn’t stand up straight when you got dressed. Minor league parks are so first-class now.”
Former Red Sox boss Lucchino heads to the minors with WooSox
By JIMMY GOLENMay 6, 2021 GMT
WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) Concrete is curing, saws are buzzing, and Larry Lucchino is at home again, in a ballpark.
At an age when many ease into retirement, the 75-year-old three-time cancer survivor instead headed to the minor leagues for one more chance to run a baseball team and build it a new home.
“I don’t think (retirement) is the way I’m wired,” Lucchino said this spring during an interview in the upper deck at the $118 million Polar Park. “I want to keep doing and being and making and contributing.”
It was half a century ago when the Louisville Colonels, the Triple A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, were for all intents and purposes kicked out of Kentucky when the state decided to remodel the stadium in which the team had been playing into a football-only facility.
The Colonels, which had been well supported by a loyal fan base, were cast adrift, left to search for a new home. They found one in Rhode Island and that, in a nutshell, is how the Pawtucket Red Sox were born. After a few years of struggling, entrepreneur Ben Mondor took over ownership and built the team into one of the most successful franchises in minor league baseball.