Published on 8/28/2026

Valley Blue Sox (New England Collegiate Baseball League) @ Mackenzie Stadium (Holyoke, MA)

SUMMER OF BASEBALL 2023: STOP 15

The team now known as the Valley Blue Sox was founded in 2001 and originally based in Concord, NH. At first, the team was doing fairly well, but things began to change once the New Hampshire Fisher Cats arrived a few miles south of Concord in 2004. After a 2007 sale, the new owners decided to move the team to Holyoke, MA due to rising costs and "low attendance"¹ (as well as the departure of the now-North Shore Navigators).

The big thing at Mackenzie (literally) is the large grandstand down the first base line which has most of the seats (and, as I recall, is in the side of a hill). Outside of it, there's only small bleacher areas around the rest of the infield, but also quite a bit of space to walk around. Also, the stadium is next to

Other than that...I'm honestly not sure what to say about the Blue Sox (except for one thing I'll talk about below). I came here twice (once in both 2022 and 2023), and the thing I honestly remember the most is hiding a foul ball I scooped from some kids (does this make me a bad person?). However, there is one other thing: they made a MASSIVE logo change between the two years I visited, and I have to say that the new logo is borderline FRIGHTENING (it honestly feels AI generated, which it still could be, but it came out in 2023 when AI was somehow still only in its infancy²).

MERCH

Despite there being several buildings down the third base side (which serve concessions), there's no "permanent" structure for merchandise sales. Instead, there's a table between some of the buildings with mostly standard items (including a jersey with "fake buttons" that I saw one time).

Also, during the 2023 visit, I got a polo with the old logo (on clearance IIRC).

ON DECK

A more familiar color of Sox - but not from Boston.