More than five years after the club folded following the reorganization of Minor League Baseball, the Lowell Spinners are set to return.
The Spinners, formerly the Short-Season Single-A affiliate of the Red Sox, will be reborn as a member of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League. The new Spinners will become the league’s seventh active franchise and begin play in the upcoming 2026 season.
A formal announcement is scheduled for Tuesday morning at Tsongas Center.
The new club will play at Lowell’s LeLacheur Park and will be owned by local businessmen Marc Deschenes and John Croteau, both high-ranking executives with Pison Technologies, a Boston-based wearable technology firm. The ownership group also has several limited partners, with some notable names including Red Sox World Series champion Johnny Damon, former MLB outfielder Zach Sorenson and current Toronto Blue Jays first base coach Mark Budzinski.
The new Lowell franchise was originally announced in August by the Futures League and UMass Lowell, which purchased LeLacheur Park from the City of Lowell in 2022 and has been working to bring a club back ever since. The Deschenes-Croteau group was among multiple bidders for the club, and Deschenes said his group learned they’d been awarded the franchise last month.
Upon confirming that the Spinners brand was available they moved forward with their plans to revive the old team.
“The biggest thing for me is trying to go out there and bring competitive baseball back to Lowell in the summertime,” said Deschenes, a former UMass Lowell baseball player who spent 10 seasons in the minors, including three with the Red Sox. “We’re building a team that will match the former Spinners level of play in the New York-Penn League, and we’re building a roster of top local talent.”
The revived Spinners will carry on a legacy established by the original franchise, which was founded in 1996 and played 24 seasons as an affiliate of the Red Sox. The Spinners featured future Red Sox stars like Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley Jr., Kevin Youkilis and Jonathan Papelbon, among others.
The original Spinners played their final season in 2019, after which the affiliate was doomed by the one-two punch of the COVID-19 pandemic and MLB’s reorganization of the minor leagues. The entire 2020 minor league season was canceled due to the pandemic, and the following winter MLB moved forward with its plans to reduce the number of affiliated clubs from 160 to 120.
Starting in 2021 all MLB clubs were permitted to carry four full-season affiliates, one each at the Triple-A, Double-A, High-A and Low-A levels. The Short-Season Single-A level was eliminated and the New York-Penn League, which traced its history back to 1939, was disbanded.
Several members of that league wound up being picked up as affiliates or found other homes, but others, including the Spinners, were left in the cold and ultimately folded.
The Spinners will become the third New York-Penn League team contracted during MiLB’s reorganization to join the Futures League, following the Vermont Lake Monsters and Norwich Sea Unicorns. Deschenes said the club will play a 62-game season starting in late May, including 31 home games and 31 road games.
Established in 2011, the Futures League is a summer college baseball league geared towards local players. The league features both returning college standouts and incoming freshmen, and as of 2025 the league has had alumni drafted in the first round of the MLB Draft in six consecutive years, including No. 5 overall pick Liam Doyle this past summer.
Other big leaguers who previously played in the Futures League include Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Sal Frelick, Chicago Cubs third baseman Matt Shaw, Houston Astros shortstop Jeremy Peña and New York Yankees standouts Cam Schlittler and Ben Rice.
