AtlanticLeagueBaseball.com broke the news earlier today that the Newark Bears have folded.
According to one source, a representative of ownership informed the staff that the team was folding today, and all staff members were essentially asked to leave. There was no advance warning.
Even though the Bears have struggled to gain fan support, the news is shocking. The Bears were to host the 2009 Atlantic League All-Star Game, and just this week I got an email marketing survey from the team. Still, if I’m shocked, I can only imagine how much worse it must be for the Newark Bears staff members — all of whom were among the nicest people I’ve met at a baseball stadium.
Mike Ashmore writes that the Bears reportedly lost more than half a million dollars this season… not hard to believe when midweek games often failed to draw more than a few hundred fans. League CEO Frank Boulton bailed out the Bridgeport Bluefish earlier this month… it remains to be seen if he’s able and willing to do the same for the Bears.
Right now, though, the only ones who will be playing baseball at Newark’s Riverfront Stadium next season are the college teams that face Rutgers-Newark [edit-and NJIT].
10/26 Edit: The Newark Star-Ledger had an article on the Bears’ situation today, including some quotes from former owner Rick Cerone. Unfortunately, the version that ran in the paper isn’t online yet. Here’s a link to an earlier version that was posted yesterday.
I wonder if it would have made a difference if the Ledger had ever given the Bears the same level of coverage that they devote to high school sports.
PaulHadsall.com 
That’s extremely disappointing. I’m originally from Kearny but since transplanted to North Carolina. We still visit family in Newark and all over NJ. I remember seeing the stadium off Route 21. I thought it was pretty cool having a baseball team in that area and I remember reading about the All-Star game being hosted there in ’09. I can’t believe the Star Ledger didn’t devote more to the team. The papers here in NC always post about the Greensboro Grasshoppers and the Winston-Salem Warthogs.
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I can’t say that the Ledger never covered the Bears. They would do one or two feature articles if the rest of the sports world was slow, and they’d try to run a one or two sentence summary of the game from the day before… if they had space.
But it was the same level of coverage that every other minor league team in the state got. I sort of thought the Newark Star-Ledger could have done better.
Now I’m not trying to suggest that the newspaper’s lack of coverage was the reason for the Newark Bears attendance problems. I just wonder if a little more coverage could have helped a bit.
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