Courtesy of Mick Haupt
It may come as a surprise for most Camels to hear New London once had its very own professional baseball team. In may of 1947 the New London Raiders played their first game
and throughout the season, managed a winning record of 50-67, landing them a spot in the playoffs. In the postseason, the Raiders defeated the Poughkeepsie Giants four games to three, before losing to the Stamford Bombers four games to one. Home games, taking place at Mercer Field, which is still a baseball field today, had space for roughly 30,000 New Londoners to gather, with admission beginning at $0.65 ($9 today).
Despite their championship run, the Raiders would go on to be dissolved the same year they came into existence being moved to Brunswick, N.J., after losing a total of $15,000 over the course of the season. Such a rapid rise and fall is rather obscure in the world of professional sports, urging one to look deeper into the surrounding circumstance for answers.
From understanding the years preceding the team’s formation, it becomes clear where their economic struggle came from and why they weren’t able to stick around very long.
The 1940s were tumultuous years in New London’s economic history. At the beginning of the decade, the town’s unemployment, carried over from the 1930s, was beginning to taper off, but largely speaking, the economy was still in recovery, having never entirely bounced back after the depression. In 1941, following Pearl Harbor, New London and Groton saw an immediate surge in military spending on local company Electric Boat, and the Submarine Base, with both operating at full capacity as the war effort swung into motion.
This new great demand for labor immediately began to lift New London out of its economic turmoil, and continued to uplift the city until the war ended in September of 1945, where the bubble of growth popped. With the war effort over, Electric Boat promptly laid off 9,000 full-time workers, going from 13,000 to just under 4,000 nearly overnight, as well as the submarine base going from 12,000 to roughly 4,000 workers. This period marks the most rapid and extreme economic contraction in New London’s history, leaving the city in a vulnerable spot.
The Raiders’ failure to survive in New London is a product of the organization being sucked into the economic vacuum created after wartime demobilization. Great financial instability of the time meant local businesses were unable to provide the team with much-needed sponsorships, advertising revenue went down, and most importantly, the cost of tickets was likely steep to locals.
For New London, the Raiders should be seen less as failed postwar urban reinvestment but rather as a casualty of poor circumstances. Dropped into a city suffering from one of the most dramatic economic contractions in its history, the time was destined to fail despite a community that embraced it briefly.
Their one-season existence serves as a reminder of how fragile local institutions tend to be when a city is struggling to find its economic footing, and regardless of the ball club’s promise, forces much larger than baseball itself were at work making its existence nearly impossible. Nevertheless, for that one summer in 1947, the Raiders offered New Londoners a beacon of joy and togetherness, as minor league baseball has done for so many.
