Spinning into a New Era

The always busy main entrance to LeLacheur Park, Aug-2012.

A good look at the seating from down the first-base line.

Along with historic mills, a Merrimack River bridge is visible beyond the outfield wall.

Chronological Tour: Stop 133

• Location: Aiken Street at the Merrimack River, Lowell, Mass. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: 1998
• Home team: Lowell Spinners, New York-Penn League (1998-2019); UMass Lowell River Hawks, America East Conference
• Capacity: 5,000

Rating: 3 baseballs

For two seasons, the Lowell Spinners, who relocated from Elmira, N.Y., when an investor from New Jersey bought the club in 1996, played at an old high school field, Alumni Field, near I-495 and the Chelmsford line. The park featured a very short right-field wall thanks to a street that could not be relocated.

The new park preserves a short right-field line, but also affords views of the Merrimack River and one of the city’s historic bridges crossing it. The stadium adds more than sufficient seating for the New York-Penn League, with the capability of building onto it for expansion should the parent Boston Red Sox maneuver to place a higher level of ball to this facility just 30 miles from Fenway Park.

Two drawbacks: It’s a relatively long walk upstairs to get into the seating bowl (they wanted to recess the field, but the soil wouldn’t allow it), and the bowl is aluminum rather than concrete. To me, though, these were minor shortcomings.

LeLacheur Park is esthetically pleasing and definitely worth a look-see if you’re in the Boston area, even though it is no longer a minor league park following the Major League Baseball restructuring of the minors. The River Hawks will continue to use LeLacheur Park as their home field.