The icy reminder of a baseball truth has blown down from New England, down from a Rhode Island city forever described as gritty, or struggling, or, more politely, challenged. No doubt you have seen signs for this brown-brick metropolis along the interstate, on your way to someplace else: Pawtucket, population 71,000.

Home of the historic Slater Mill, once a vital cog in the Industrial Revolution and now an obligatory class-trip destination. Home of the China Inn, the Modern Diner and the Irish Social Club; mention my name and they’ll charge you double. Home of McCoy Stadium.

Now Pawtucket is also home to this familiar lesson: Beyond the game’s innate poetry, which has seduced generations of hacks to summon their inner Whitman for every slam-bam double play, professional baseball is a cold business, as emotional at its core as an expectorated spray of tobacco juice.

On Monday morning, a group of high-powered investors announced their purchase of the Pawtucket Red Sox, the Class AAA franchise of the Boston Red Sox, as well as their plans to build a shiny bauble of a stadium for the International League team in downtown Providence, the capital city just south of Pawtucket — but not Pawtucket.

During a news conference in Providence — and not Pawtucket — the new owners indicated their intentions to abandon McCoy Stadium in the next few years. Even if their hopes for a waterfront stadium in Providence should fail, the implication was: This great Red Sox Nation of ours covers a lot of New England turf.

“Our sense is that if the state wants us here, it should be the Rhode Island Red Sox,” one of the lead investors, a lawyer named Jim Skeffington, told The Providence Journal. “We’re all Rhode Islanders.”

Not exactly. Skeffington may practice law in Providence, and a few other stakeholders may have Ocean State ties, but another principal owner is a Larry Lucchino, from Pittsburgh. You might have heard of him; he will continue in his role as president and chief executive of the Boston Red Sox. The group also includes a couple of minority owners of the parent club, as well as Fenway Sports Management, described as a “sister company of the Boston Red Sox and a wholly owned subsidiary of Fenway Sports Group.”

The Boston Red Sox organization no doubt wanted complete control of its most storied farm team, which makes business sense. And it clearly understands the importance and marketability of Boston tradition.

But do the new owners understand Pawtucket tradition? Do they know why free parking matters, and having boy and girl scouts camp overnight on the outfield grass, and being able to take a family of six to a ballgame without stopping first to pawn an heirloom?

Have they sat in the shadowed lap of the old ballpark after another tough day’s grind, shouting encouragement to up-and-comers and down-and-outers while amiable ghosts share your peanuts and steal sips of your beer?

Do they understand McCoy?

Construction of the stadium began in the late 1930s at the behest of Pawtucket’s all-powerful mayor, Thomas P. McCoy, who had a fondness for shamrock-patterned ties and a red rose in his lapel. In choosing Hammond’s Pond as the building site, he ensured years of employment for hundreds of laborers hired to stabilize the seemingly bottomless muck. Tales of vehicles and equipment swallowed overnight continue to this day.

By its completion in 1942, the 6,000-seat stadium had cost more than the construction of Notre Dame’s much larger football stadium; more, even, than the assessed value of Fenway Park. But the mayor had little time to enjoy his expensive little ballpark; he died, suddenly, in 1945. At a dedication ceremony the next spring, the Boys and Girls Club serenaded his memory with “The Bells of St. Mary’s.”

Over the next quarter-century, Pawtucket saw its mills go dark as the textile industry went south. McCoy Stadium also struggled. A Boston Braves affiliate ended its brief tenancy, leaving the ballpark to scholastic events, vandals and decay — a place for the city to store heavy machinery and mounds of salt and sand.

Minor league baseball returned in the mid-1960s: first a Cleveland Indians franchise, then a Boston Red Sox farm team, run always on the cheap. One owner had baseballs fed into an odd, octagonal box filled with erasers; turn a crank and the balls would be scrubbed into passable game-day use. Another owner tried to distract from the sorrowful level of play by hiring teenage girls to clean the bases between innings.

That same owner briefly renamed the team the Rhode Island Red Sox, just as the new owners are now proposing. But within a year the team was back to being the Pawtucket Red Sox — as well as being all but bankrupt.

Its unlikely savior was Ben Mondor, a French-Canadian immigrant and self-made millionaire who knew a lot about turning around failing businesses, but almost nothing about baseball. Against his better judgment, he took over the team at the behest of pleading baseball executives. His first impression of McCoy could have been inscribed over the ticket window:

“What a dump.”

Slowly, though, Mondor changed the stadium’s reputation, giving the bum’s rush to mugs who saw it as an open-air saloon, and inviting families to enjoy a safe and inexpensive night at the ballpark. He also wisely chose as his aides-de-camp a pair of young go-getters, Mike Tamburro and Lou Schwechheimer, both eager to sell pregame tickets and pick up postgame trash to make the venture work.

Mondor’s daring business model — baseball at a fair price and in a family-friendly atmosphere — worked. Helping it along was McCoy’s godsend of a claim as the setting for the longest game in baseball history: a 1981 matchup between the PawSox and the Rochester Red Wings that lasted 33 innings and featured, among other notables, the future Hall of Famers Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr.

Pawtucket won that meaningless, meaningful game.

As the years passed, the city’s infrastructure declined, its once-ubiquitous newspaper lost most of its circulation, and even its tired zoo — featuring a beleaguered local celebrity, Fanny the elephant — mercifully closed. The children and grandchildren of millworkers moved up and out, to Cumberland, to Lincoln, and across the Massachusetts line, to Attleboro. Other immigrants settled into the triple-deckers looming over narrow streets, seeking elusive stability during fits of protracted recession, while entrepreneurs imagined other uses for old mills.

But Pawtucket always had McCoy, where future Red Sox stars made their names, and often returned when on rehab assignment. In these ways, Boston royalty was granted to a city nicknamed the Bucket.

Mondor died in 2010, but Tamburro and Schwechheimer preserved his business model; improved on it, in fact. Countless children — many from Pawtucket — have camped out on McCoy green, received free medical checkups and goody bags, caught autographed baseballs lobbed from the field, tossed out the first pitch and saw their birthdays, weddings and military service celebrated on the Jumbotron.

For years, the stadium was near or at the top of International League popularity. In 2008, it had the league’s highest total attendance, with nearly 637,000 visitors. But those numbers have gradually dropped; last year its total attendance was just over a half-million.

There have been other troubles. A structure built on a sinkhole more than 70 years ago by a roguish mayor may never be free of patchwork and periodic renovations, and its aesthetics are more in the mind than the eye. The stadium sits a couple of miles from the interstate, and the neighboring surroundings — of modest homes, triple-deckers and an industrial park — do not make for a “destination” experience. Even with that Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner.

Maybe it was time. Maybe.

The parent club is calling home its prodigal Pawtucket child. Ben Mondor’s widow, Madeleine, made the decision to sell from distant Florida, and the team’s minority owners — Tamburro, the chief executive, and Schwechheimer, the vice president and general manager — went along, and will stay on.

Still, the ends to which the new owners avoided use of “McCoy” in their statements of scripted exuberance could only wound the Bucket faithful.

Mayor Donald R. Grebien of Pawtucket told The Providence Journal that the new owners informed him last weekend of their plans to extract the PawSox from the city that gave the team its nickname. “I can’t tell you half of what they said, because when they said, ‘It’s not going to be Pawtucket,’ that just took the air out of the room,” the mayor said.

The Pawtucket Red Sox have a state lease for McCoy that lasts until 2021, but leases are like hearts. The State of Rhode Island, itself in economic straits, is a motivated buyer of nearly anything proposed, given that the new owners told one Providence councilman they would “expand the arc of consideration into Massachusetts” if the waterfront plan faltered.

Baseball is a business. The Red Sox have to do what is best, and most profitable, for the future of their organization. The “nation” expects no less.

But the next time you’re driving along I-95 in spring or summer, exit in Pawtucket. Risk the five minutes it takes to reach McCoy. Enjoy the free parking. Splurge for a $13 box seat. And buy the ghost beside you a beer, before all of this slips into the sinkhole of memory.