Rhode Island officials were caught off guard by toymaker Hasbro's potential move from Pawtucket to Boston

While there are many names that fit some aspect of Connors’ attributes, the overwhelming consensus of those I spoke to can be best summed up by Christopher Marsella, a prominent Providence developer.

“No one comes to mind, and we need at least five,” Marsella says. (Apologies to Marsella, whose phone will be ringing off the hook today from insulted people who too often don’t lift a finger for Rhode Island until they are publicly called out.)

We could really use someone to prove Marsella wrong today, as rumor has it that the toy giant turned entertainmententertainment Hasbro is seriously considering moving from its Pawtucket headquarters to more comfortable quarters in or around Boston.

The Boston Business Journal reported Monday that Hasbro is looking for a 200,000- to 250,000-square-foot space in downtown Boston or the suburbs. My colleague Alexa Gagosz confirmed Tuesday that company CEO Chris Cocks has told employees that Hasbro may move, but not right away.

“But don’t pack your bags yet,” Cocks wrote in a companywide email. “It’s still very early and nothing is set in stone: we won’t be moving for at least 18 months.”

Most depressing, and yet hardly surprising, is how blindsided Rhode Island government leaders were by the news. No one at Hasbro had the courtesy to call Gov. Dan McKee, House Speaker Joe Shekarchi, Commerce Secretary Liz Tanner or Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien before the news broke.

And no one on our side, it seems, had a cell phone number for anyone at Hasbro to know where things stood. Grebien told WPRO’s Gene Valicenti that he and McKee had Emails — not even phone calls — to the Hasbro team to set up an appointment.

Well done everyone for staying on top of things.

This would of course be another blow to Pawtucket, which lost its AAA Red Sox affiliate to Worcester in 2021. The city plans to open a new USL soccer stadium next year. Losing Hasbro would probably be worse, since there’s no way Grebien would replace them with Mattel.

This isn’t the first time Hasbro has been rumored to be moving out of Pawtucket. There was talk of finding a new headquarters when Gina Raimondo was still governor, and Raimondo touted the Superman building, the Providence Place mall or the former Interstate 195 lot in Providence as potential new locations for the company.

At the time, the consensus was that former CEO Brian Goldner was too close to Raimondo to abandon the state completely, no matter what his board wanted. Goldner was closely involved in creating the Partnership for Rhode Island, a roundtable of top CEOs who support economic development, education initiatives and other projects aimed at improving the state.

Goldner died of cancer in 2021 at age 58, and Hasbro’s ties to the Rhode Island business community began to fade. To be fair to Cocks, he has bigger fish to fry. The company announced plans to lay off 1,100 employees worldwide and close smaller offices in Providence in 2023.

But things have changed for Hasbro lately.

“Transformers One,” a new animated film, opens in theaters nationwide this week, and the company’s stock hit a 52-week high this week on strong sales of its latest film, “Magic: The Gathering.” It was trading at $70.42 a share at the close of trading Tuesday.

Now there is talk of a possible move to Boston.

Hasbro may have leapfrogged Pawtucket. The company has struggled to recruit talent in Rhode Island, in part because there are more prestigious cities in the country to work and live in. The company is now so well-established in Hollywood that California is intriguing. And there’s no doubt that New York and Boston are more attractive to workers than Pawtucket (at least until they try to buy a house).

But there’s a sense that Rhode Island would have a better chance of keeping Hasbro if we had someone like Boston had in Connors, the kind of person who could bring politicians and executives to the table to figure out what each person needs.

Rhode Island used to have such leaders.

Bruce Sundlun, Terry Murray, Tom Ryan and Alan Hassenfeld of Hasbro fame have been among the most frequently mentioned names over the past couple of months (Sundlun is gone, but Murray, Ryan and Hassenfeld are still alive, by the way).

These days, it would be hard to find anyone with the clout to convince Hasbro executives to stop them from leaving.

Forget about finding Rhode Islander Jack Connors. Can someone at least share Chris Cocks’ cell phone number with Governor McKee?

You can contact Dan McGowan at [email protected]. Follow him @danmcgowan.