Sportventures

The Summer of Baseball 2023: an Introduction

The last few things I've never published are going up soon!

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Today marks the final day of the New England summer leagues, as the third and final game of the Futures League's championship series is set to take place1.

Back in 2023, I had a goal: Visit every summer collegiate team I knew of in New England. This ended up taking MONTHS of planning, as I had to figure out how to squeeze the 31 visits into the weekends of June and July (though thankfully, I was also able to use a few weekdays as well). After each visit, I wrote down a few thoughts on the stadiums and what I thought about the experiences (aka the precursor to THIS site).

In the years that followed. I never looked back at what I wrote...until I started this blog. I felt that what I had back then was too widely varied: some were interesting, others a bit too simple, and I actually completely forgot to write about one of the venues! However, with me starting this blog combined with the fact that returns to many of these places being MASSIVE question marks for the future, I felt it was finally time to "finish" the posts and publish them here. They're going to be going up on days when I don't have a "game" post going up (because - surprise surprise - I have a few things I plan on doing this month). Also, don't be surprised if they're a bit more "vague" than normal - many of them are going to be based solely off of what I remember from THREE YEARS AGO.

I'm going to be posting these in the order I visited them that summer with a few exceptions, as there are - of course - several teams in this list that I've visited since starting this blog, so they're already here in the list (no point talking about them a second time, right?):

  1. Brockton Rox (Futures League)2
  2. COMING SOON
  3. Nashua Silver Knights (Futures League)
  4. COMING SOON
  5. New Britain Bees (Futures League)
  6. COMING SOON
  7. COMING SOON
  8. COMING SOON
  9. COMING SOON
  10. COMING SOON
  11. COMING SOON
  12. COMING SOON
  13. COMING SOON
  14. COMING SOON
  15. COMING SOON
  16. COMING LATER (I'll explain in due time)
  17. COMING SOON
  18. COMING SOON
  19. COMING SOON
  20. Wareham Gatemen (Cape League)
  21. COMING SOON
  22. Chatham Anglers (Cape League)
  23. COMING SOON
  24. COMING SOON
  25. COMING SOON
  26. COMING SOON
  27. COMING SOON
  28. Danbury Westerners (New England League)
  29. Bristol Blues (New England League)
  30. COMING SOON
  31. COMING SOON

A few final notes:

  1. The Futures League added a new team in 2026: a revival of the Lowell Spinners of New York-Penn League fame. I DID have thoughts about visiting during July 4th weekend, but traffic concerns (plus the fact that it was HOT) ended up scuttling the trip - though I did briefly visit their stadium back in 2025 (before it was announced they would be the Spinners again) and wrote a few thoughts on the place.

  2. This list does not include the Winnipesaukee Muskrats, who had folded before 2023.

  3. I am aware of the existence of a fourth league (the Greater Northeast Collegiate Baseball League, which is a member of The Players League). However, as it's currently based out of a single stadium in Maine3 (and the league's lack of status seems to be leading to stability issues), I'm not sure if or when I'll be able to get to it.

  4. I actually wrote about the Cape League stadiums as far back as 2021 after a family vacation on the Cape, but sadly those notes appear to be lost to time...

ON DECK

We're going to start this series tomorrow with a somewhat "interesting" team...probably.

There's a chance I go and do something today, but the odds of it are honestly not super high and shrinking by the "hour" for various reasons, so I guess if I don't start this tomorrow, then I'll start on Monday.


Footnotes

  1. "Fun" fact: the Futures League playoffs started the day after game 1 of BOTH the Cape League and NECBL championship series.

  2. Yes, this post is technically NOT about the summer league side, but it goes into them in pretty decent depth, so it's what I'm using for this series. Also, as mentioned in that post, the Rox no longer compete in the Futures League.

  3. I did TRY to visit this stadium once as I drove past it, but an event was going on that I didn't want to deal with (it's in Old Orchard Beach, which is one of Maine's bigger tourist destinations).

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TAGS:

  • Baseball
  • Cape Cod Baseball League
  • College Sports
  • Futures League
  • New England Collegiate Baseball League