Portland will continue to be home for Red Sox Double-A affiliate
The Boston Red Sox and all other 29 MLB teams over the past few months have had to downsize their minor league affiliates. Some teams are swapping affiliates while most are keeping the same, with a couple teams just switching what level a certain affiliate was at. One team that will be staying for years to come is the Red Sox Double-A affiliate, the Portland Sea Dogs.
The Sea Dogs and the Red Sox agreed on a 10 year extension through 2030. Before MLB took total control over the MiLB, deals between the two sides were more like a role player gets when his contract is up. Most of the time teams would revisit the deals and decide to extend or not after 2 or 3 years. These new agreements have many improvements for minor league teams including salary increases from 38-72% higher for players.
The Sea Dogs have been a part of the Red Sox Organization since the beginning of the 2003 season. From their first season in 1994 until 2002, they were the Double-A affiliate for the then Florida Marlins (now Miami). Their home stadium, Hadlock Field, is a former high school stadium that the team renovated to look more like a professional baseball stadium.
Minor League attendance as a whole went up 2.6% in the 2019 season from the previous year. If you look at the attendance totals the Sea Dogs have garnered over the years, it’s no surprise the Red Sox extended their relationship as long as they possibly could. While the city of Portland pales in comparison population wise to some other minor league cities, such as Las Vegas, San Antonio and New Orleans, the location hasn’t hindered their attendance.
In 2018, the Sea Dogs beat out all three teams in attendance. The Sea Dogs total attendance that year was 346,341. The closest out of the three other mentioned cities was Las Vegas, whose 332,224 attendance total is still over 14,000 less than Portland.
There are two things that really make this jump off the page even more. The first things is as I mentioned before, how Las Vegas is a bigger market than Portland. Almost 600,000 more people live in Vegas than Portland. Maybe people are more interested in gambling than Minor League Baseball in Vegas, but it still says something about the fans in and around Portland.
The second thing that stands out also has to do with attendance, but hits a little closer to home. In 2019, the Sea Dogs outdid their big brother, Red Sox Triple-A affiliate Pawtucket (now Worcester). They did it in a stadium with less capacity too. Portland’s Hadlock Field seats 7,368 while Pawtucket’s McCoy Stadium sat 10,031. They both play about the same games during their regular season(s), yet differ almost 3,000 capacity wise.
The Red Sox VP of Player Development, Ben Crockett, called the fans in Portland “passionate”. Crockett also went on to say it gives the prospects playing for the Sea Dogs “a taste of what they will see at Fenway.” The attendance numbers show the VP is right. The fans in and around Portland don’t just show up at the start of the season or when the team is on a streak, they show up consistently all season.
As someone who lives just about the same distance away from Boston and Portland, I’ve been to a Sea Dogs game. Going to Hadlock Field for a game of course is more affordable than going to Fenway. But there’s also a lot to do in the city of Portland. A good amount of New Englanders go to Maine for their vacations, not much better to do than go to a ballgame to see the future of the Boston Red Sox.
Over 100 players that have been a part of the Sea Dogs at one point have gone onto play for the Red Sox. Those players include the two main faces of the Red Sox offense, in Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers. In the next 10 years, that number can only go up, and it will. This extension of their relationship benefits both cities, and both teams in more ways than one.