Bluefish Moving to North Carolina

By Bob Phillips

This weekend may very well be the last time professional baseball will
be played in the City of Bridgeport as the Bluefish will be moving to
North Point, NC.

BRIDGEPORT–Well, this didn’t take long. The Bridgeport Bluefish, essentially booted out of the Park City when the City opted to convert the Ballpark at Harbor Yard into what it describes as a “boutique amphitheater,” will relocate to High Point, N.C. starting next season.

“We had choices for where the Bluefish would go,” Bluefish owner Frank Boulton said. Speculation ran from New York and New Jersey sites to North Carolina and Texas. “We spent 20 years in Bridgeport, and the city made a decision to go in the amphitheater direction. We wish them the best.”

Three home games remain on the 2017 schedule—a weekend set (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) with the Somerset Patriots. Should they make it into the postseason, they will continue to play at the ballpark until they are eliminated—or win the championship.

While the Bluefish are gone, it’s important to note that the amphitheater isn’t close to being a done deal yet. A formal contract has not yet been drafted, and the neighboring Webster Bank Arena is threatening legal action, claiming that a music venue right next door violates the non-compete clause in the facilities’ contract with the city.

The Bluefish, who were operating on a one-year contract, would have stayed in Bridgeport if given the opportunity. The move, however, will certainly be a boon to the team’s coffers. As an independent team (that is with no major league affiliation), the Bluefish were responsible for all of their operating expenses—facility maintenance (although the ballpark is owned by the city, cash-strapped Bridgeport has been lax in this area), travel, and, most importantly, player and front office contracts.

“It’ll be a little slice of history—our last few games [in Bridgeport],” Boulton said. “It’s ending a 20-year run.”

“It’s really starting to hit home to me,” said Mickey Herbert, co-founder of the team and currently the president of the Bridgeport Regional Business Council. “No matter what, whether the amphitheater thing flies or doesn’t, there’s not going to be a Bluefish team around.”

And it’s unlikely that professional baseball will ever return to the Park City.

While the level of play in the Atlantic League his high (equivalent to
AAA), the Bluefish have come in last in the league in one key statistic,
attendance, for the last several years. They should do much better in
North Carolina.

As for next year, it’s not clear where the team will play, or if the name will change. While High Point Bluefish might not seem a fit—the city is over 200 miles from the coast—when the Lakers moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles they did not change their name, regardless of the lack of lakes in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. Nor did the Grizzlies change monikers when moving from Vancouver to Memphis. High Point, which is known as the “furniture capital of the world,” is quite a bit smaller than Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city with a population of 144,229 according to the 2010 Census. The Bluefish also had the ability to draw from nearby cities such as New Haven and Stamford. High Point, meanwhile, has a population of slightly more than 111,000. And while a brand new $30 million stadium with 5,000 seats for baseball is being built in downtown High Point, it will not be ready until 2018. The only other stadium in the city, Coy O. Williard Sr. Baseball Stadium, home of the High Point University Panthers, has a seating capacity of just 550.

As for the Bluefish’s farewell series in Bridgeport, Herbert hopes fans will turn out to bid the team adieu to the Park City and to the Nutmeg State.

“It’s almost like a funeral dirge, but we’re all going to go and kind of say we were there for the first game, we’ll be there for the last game,” he said.

—with staff reports