I’m hearing a lot of grumbling from my baseball fan friends who are really disturbed that it appears the city will once again lose the Portland Beavers because PGE Park is going to be modified for soccer and football, with no further configuration for baseball. And of course, no obvious sites for local baseball relocation.

And I’m having to tell them that this time, I’m not on their side.

While I’m not a soccer fan, I understand this city’s romance with the sport. In many ways it is the perfect sport for Portland — all-inclusive, European, Yuppie, rowdy. It’s perfectly Portland, actually. And it’s an easy sport to garner fan support because there just aren’t many games. Perfect for a “mid-major” city like this one.

But the bottom line for me is real simple: Is PGE Park as a baseball venue worth fighting for? The easy answer is: No way. I was there as a little kid for the very first baseball game there, in 1956. It was poor then and it’s still not a good spot for baseball.

Yes, a lot of great players have played there. But if anybody ought to be nostalgic about the joint it’s me. I practically grew up in that place, as a batboy for the Beavers and later a clubhouse boy, pressbox boy, PA announcer, scoreboard operator, official scorer and even a director of group sales. Later, I covered the team for many seasons, starting when it returned to Portland in 1978. I do not think there are many people on the planet who have watched more games there than I have.

But I’m not feeling much of a connection there. It was always a very cold-feeling stadium and never a “ballpark.” Ever. It’s pretty much an inadequate place for baseball, from having too many seats to having way too many poor seats. The concourse is too small, the restrooms too scarce and the seats are difficult to get to. And when you get more than about 7,000 people in there, it’s a very uncomfortable place to be.

I long for a day when the citizens of Portland can have a real ballpark. Not a football stadium pretending to be ballpark, like PGE Park, which is still a venue better served as a greyhound race track than a ballpark.

But oh yeah, we don’t want to spend money in this town to build even a minor-league park. Mostly that’s because a great many people here don’t know how nice those cool new minor-league ballparks are — and what they would do to spark interest in the team.

And hey, we just remodeled old PGE Park a while back, didn’t we? Well, yes — but it was an overall catastrophe, for sure. And we have to admit that and move on. It was poorly designed and not well-thought-out — a project I will always believe should never have been chosen in the city’s request-for-proposal process — but that’s another topic for another day.

Yes, we did fund a poor stadium remodel. But it’s not as if this city has been investing a whole lot of coin in sports venues over the years. Sports fans, you’re living in a city that has NEVER, and I’m including old Vaughn Street Ballpark, funded the construction of a new baseball stadium. It has NEVER funded the building of a new football stadium.

EVER. I mean, is there another city in the world of at least moderate size that can say that? Yes, we funded Memorial Coliseum for peanuts, about half a century ago. That’s pretty much it for all of sports. And of course, the collective ego in this city dictates that a lot of people here think we’ve taken the right path in that regard — and the entire rest of the world is wrong. Yeah, sure.

In the last few years, Seattle has spent more than a billion bucks on football and baseball venues and while you heard a ton of grumbling about it at the time, you’re not hearing it now. People up there are ecstatic with what the Mariners and Seahawks and their venues have done for Seattle.

But that’s the difference between a big-league city and a bush-league town. And so don’t come at me asking to save PGE Park for baseball. I’m not down with that. We’ve lost the Beavers before — twice. And maybe being without them again will finally spark an interest in building a new ballpark. If it doesn’t, well, that’s fine by me.

I mean, really — this is Portland. And it’s about time we started holding out for something better than just the constant attempts to turn a cow’s ear into a silk purse.

Tweet This Post

Rachel Bachman did a very good job with this story about the selling of soccer to the hooligans and punks of America. She got the money quote from a former commissioner of the MLS:

Forget the kids. The future of Major League Soccer is in young, scarf-snapping, mostly male rowdies, former commissioner of MLS Doug Logan says.

“Soccer audiences at their best have got to be a little dangerous,” said Logan, now CEO of USA Track and Field. “It’s three guys with a beer cursing at the guy on the field. It’s not a family activity.

“If you want a family activity, go to the circus.”

And then there’s these quotes, too:

“There was always this expectation, which has turned out to be fallacious, that as kids who grew up playing soccer as children, as they grow up, they’re going to be fans to go buy tickets for soccer at a professional level,” said Marc Ganis, president of Chicago-based sports consulting firm Sportscorp Ltd. “It hasn’t worked out that way in huge numbers. It just hasn’t.”

When the MLS launched in 1996, a faction of team owners thought the key to success was to attract the nation’s soccer moms and their kids, said Logan, league commissioner until 1999.

“And nothing could be further from the truth,” Logan said. “Team sports is tribal — and, unfortunately, male. In its finest heyday on ESPN, on ESPN2, the audience (demographic) for the WNBA was 71-72 percent male.

“Women don’t turn television sets on to watch stuff except maybe gymnastics, swimming — you know, on an Olympic year — and skating. You can’t force something there that isn’t there.”

A sport that chooses to market itself to people who want to behave this way is asking for some major trouble.

First, you’re not going to have much of a chance, in this country, of ever gaining mainstream acceptance. Second, at some point somebody is going to get seriously hurt or die and then your whole league is going to end up in a courtroom trying to prove it didn’t encourage the very behaviors that caused the death.

And losing a lawsuit like that, which you would, could shut your whole league down.

Tweet This Post

The buzz is that there will be a news conference Friday morning here, announcing that the MLS has officially granted an expansion franchise to Portland.

Tweet This Post

By now, most of you have seen this story, I assume. It says Portland is the No. 1 most unhappy city in the country.

Now I might quarrel with that, seeing as how I can’t imagine someone in, say, New Orleans, being happier than those here. But we are a rather unhappy bunch at times.

You’re going to think I’m kidding about some of this but I’m not. I believe it would be a much happier town if we had Major League Soccer here. People think just because I don’t happen to be a soccer fan, that I don’t want it to come to town. That’s baloney. I’d love to have it here. Hey, I’m a professional curmudgeon but I’m not a jerk (honest).  Just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want everyone else to have it.

I make fun of soccer because it’s fun to do that. But I don’t begrudge others from enjoying it. And here’s the deal — what has always upset me most about small-town Portland is that our politicians, for years, haven’t ever considered sports as a viable option to making this town a better place to live.

I saw a story last night on television that said movies are enjoying a huge financial uptick lately. It’s quite obvious why — people need an escape from these depressing times. For a couple of hours, you can go inside a theater and forget about the real world.

Sports provide the same service, but do it even better because they allow the populace to come together, blow off some steam and unite behind their own team.

Football? Baseball? Lacrosse? Hockey? Whatever sport you’re talking about there are people willing to pay to watch it in varying amounts. Just about EVERY OTHER CITY IN THE WORLD recognizes this and doesn’t feel guilty about building stadiums, arenas, parks and fields where its citizens can enjoy watching the local team play.

Here, even though the Trail Blazers have proved over and over again how important their franchise is as a uniter of people and a (once again) source of pride for the community, it’s almost as if our city fathers (ouch, tough expression to use these days in Portland) have been embarrassed to push professional sports as a serious tool here to help people feel better about themselves and their city.

For decades now, it’s as if you have to apologize for wanting more pro sports in Portland. Soccer fans, you may well hate baseball. That’s fine, but now do you feel the pain of the MLB-to-Portland supporters, who have tried in vain just to find a politician who knows how to play catch?

What? The No. 22 market in the country thinks it ought to have another big-league sport? Disgraceful! Not while our streets have potholes! Not as long as our education system still isn’t perfect!

Yes, because, of course — you can’t have repaired and safe streets while having professional sports in your town. You can’t educate your kids while watching pro soccer. Of course. I mean, those fools in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Dallas, Miami, New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, Seattle, etc., etc. — they’ve got NOTHING positive going on at all.

Meanwhile, here in Portland where we have no pro soccer, MLB or pro football — we’ve got all our problems solved!

The whole thing is kind of depressing.

Tweet This Post

This city is getting ready to make a run at a Major League Soccer franchise and booting baseball out of PGE Park. That would mean building a new baseball-only stadium somewhere else. You know all about that, by now.

But I doubt a lot of folks in this sleepy little burg — Soccer City USA, you know — are paying much attention to the sad state of the MLS. ESPN has pulled the plug on the Thursday night MLS game of the week, preferring now to attempt to move the games to different times of the week, hoping better lead-ins will aid ratings.

The ratings are embarrassingly bad. And getting worse. This league, in spite of all the high hopes, is being ignored in record numbers. Last season, the TV ratings for these games were 0.2, with an estimated 253,000 people – yikes! — watching the games nationally each week. Those “Snuggy” infomercials would get better numbers. Even worse, many of the games featured shots of vast patches of empty seats in the MLS stadiums.

Is this an investment this city wants to make?

Tweet This Post

. . . and it always will be.

Don’t talk to me about all those kids out there playing it. They’ve been playing it now for three decades and nothing much has changed in the world of spectator sports.

Look, I’d love it for Portland to get an MLS franchise. I really would. Just don’t ask me to invest in it. Man, $40 million for a franchise in that league? In this economy? The Arena Football League just suspended operations and that league had an NBC contract and was pretty well funded.

That fee is just to buy in — before you start spending money on players, coaches and promotion. I think it’s going to be a real tough go here — or anywhere else.

Tweet This Post

City Commissioner Randy Leonard is just back from New York and a visit with the commissioner of Major League Soccer. What are the chances of Portland being granted an expansion franchise by the league?

Leonard says it’s in the bag if all goes well with PGE Park. “It’s clear to me that it’s ours to lose,” Leonard said Wednesday.

Tweet This Post

I will say this one more time: I do not have anything against Major League Soccer coming to Portland. But what I do not care for are misrepresentations about what we’d be getting.

This story in The Oregonian bothered me right from the headline on through to the end. The headline characterizing the MLS as “big-time soccer” was laughable. I mean, seriously — MLS is probably the seventh- or eighth-best league in the world, right? It’s not big time in any real sense of the word, from TV ratings to attendance.

You aren’t big time when you average fewer than 17,000 fans per game and get television ratings of 0.2. That’s zero point two??? This story said MLS ratings are “roughly on a par with the WNBA.” Yikes! And that’s big time? Come on, folks — that’s flat-out awful. WNBA franchises cost $10 million, if you can find someone to buy them. For the most part, it’s a league being run as a loss leader by the NBA for no apparent reason. And the MLS wants $40 million for a franchise that gets the same 0.2 TV rating as the WNBA?

Ultimately, big-time leagues in this country support themselves through television revenue. This league is miles away from doing that so it will never be able to pay the huge salaries needed to bring enough great players into the league to make it competitive with other leagues around the world.

The Oregonian also breathlessly reports, “MLS is also reaping new revenue by selling ad space on the front of team jerseys.” Wow, now there’s something that gives the league a touch of class. Selling ads on the uniforms — like your local Little League. Soccer teams have been doing this for years, by the way, usually finding beer companies — totally appropriate when it comes to soccer and its fans — to purchase space somewhere on the uniforms.

Again, bring MLS to Portland. I think it would be great. But please, let’s not confuse it with bringing real major-league sports to the area.

Tweet This Post

If you don’t know the story yet, you can go here and get the version from The Oregonian, which actually called all of Lents “Felony Flats” today (boy, are they going to get letters). I don’t have the space here to rehash the whole thing and want to zero in on what’s wrong and what’s right about the Randy Leonard/Merritt Paulson plan.

First, for those who just don’t understand why a city should ever invest in sports facilities, you might as well move on now — I have nothing here that will interest you. I will only make you angry. Just about every major U.S. city (Portland is now the No. 22 TV market in the country, yet it still wishes so fervently to act like a hick town) has invested more money in sports facilities than Portland has. And I think those cities have also managed to fill their potholes, educate their children and keep the streets safe as well or better than we have. I do believe they may not have as many bike paths as we do, however.

The point is, Paulson is going to come up with a $40 million fee for a Major League Soccer team and I think it’s possible he’s going to lose his shirt on the investment. If this city really is as soccer mad as it claims, helping him with a stadium shouldn’t be out of line. That league, by the way, is anything but major league and anyone who watches the Premiership every week knows what I’m talking about. I’m not sold on the future of the league but I admire this man for having the nerve to chase it — which seems to me what this city wants him to do.

I don’t think you’re going to find a bigger supporter of baseball than me in Portland over the last 30 years. Particularly major-league baseball. Which gets me to this plan. I’m not totally convinced that building an 8,500-seat, minor-league facility in Portland fits into our future unless it’s a piece of a bigger plan. If a new minor-league park is built here — that’s fine, I don’t necessarily care how many seats it has. But I would like it to have the ability to be expandable someday to serve, at the very least, as an interim big-league facility. I’d like that to at least be part of a long-term strategy.

I worry that if this ballpark is built it would, 10 years from now, turn into an impediment to building a separate big-league park. You know, the way the last (poorly planned) PGE Park renovation is a bit of a roadblock to this very plan. People don’t like having to pay taxes to redo something they just did a few years ago.

I’m not going to debate the Lents Park location here today at all. Let’s take that out of the equation. Mayor Sam Adams and Leonard are sold on it for a variety of reasons and so are the residents of the neighborhood — which is a big plus. There are certainly better spots but they aren’t as viable right now. I spoke with Paulson Thursday morning and he did make it clear that the Lents location isn’t etched in stone quite yet. “We will not do it without adequate parking,” he said. “It has to have enough on-site parking.”

What bothered me a lot about the Thursday story is the notion that attendance for Triple-A ball is something that impacts a city’s chance at a major-league club.

The Oregonian story today contained this priceless gem, not as a quote, mind you — but a statement by the writer, Anna Griffin: “If anything, Portland needs to prove that it can support a thriving Triple-A franchise first. Getting the Beavers out of cavernous PGE Park — where even the rare crowd of 7,000 or 8,000 fans leaves the place more than half empty — is crucial. Average attendance at a Beavers home game is about 5,500.”

The fact is, there is no correlation AT ALL to drawing well in the Pacific Coast League and getting a big-league franchise and I’m sick of hearing that there is. It’s like telling a city that it must show it can support the WNBA before it gets an NBA team. Tampa Bay and Miami didn’t even have Triple-A baseball before they got big-league teams. Denver drew only 347,615 in the season before it went into the National League. Las Vegas, likely Portland’s biggest rival for the next available big-league team, drew 400 fewer people per game than the Beavers did this season. So can we please give that argument a rest?

I have a great deal of appreciation for Paulson’s guts. He’s paying a lot of money for an MLS franchise. He’s going to have to sell that thing like crazy in a town that talks the talk about soccer but has to show it can walk the walk. And he’s shaken up the baseball community with the idea of building a minor-league ballpark in a time when most of us would rather Portland move on from its bush-league-town image.

But at least someone is out there pushing Portland toward a better sports future. He’s gotten Portland’s two most powerful politicians on board, too — which is a major achievement.

Moving forward, there are things to be mindful of and here they are:

Any renovation work on PGE Park has to include enlarging the concourse and adding rest rooms and concession stands. The main aisle has to be wider and access to seating must be better. The previous plan was a cosmetic upgrade but not an upgrade at all in terms of accessibility or function. Let’s get our money’s worth and make this one work for fans, OK?

The Lents Park ballpark could be a cool place that will revitalize that area. My concern is the cost. They’re talking about $35-$40 million and I think that’s too low. It wouldn’t surprise me if it takes $60 million in tomorrow’s dollars.

But if they can keep the costs under control (always a question with governments everywhere) and a consistent vision toward the future, I’d endorse it.

Tweet This Post