In the comments section of a recent post I heard a lot of people whining about Allen.

You can say what you want about how he’s run the team — and I’ve been critical of his management style — and you can even stay all paranoid about him moving the team to Seattle, which he isn’t going to do.

But I remain firmly convinced of one thing — without Allen as the team’s owner, the Trail Blazers would have moved out of Portland a long time ago.

Huh?

Well, here’s the thing — Allen’s most lasting contribution to Portland sports isn’t just his ownership of the team, it’s that he built the Rose Garden. And I will maintain forever that he’s the only one who would have done it.

I mean, seriously — you think the city of Portland would have done it? There is NO WAY. In the 90s, this team would have still been trying to make it playing in Memorial Coliseum and our city would have slipped into its usual “if you want an arena, you better build it yourself” mode and any other rational owner in sports would have looked elsewhere.

I mean, plenty of other cities would have been willing to build an NBA owner a new arena. The Trail Blazers would have moved to Kansas City or Las Vegas a decade ago without Paul Allen deciding just to build his own venue, which ended up costing him a lot of money and heartache.

The fact is, the price you pay for major-league teams these days — which most progressive cities believe is important — is building the venue.

Portland doesn’t do sports venues. We re-do them. Which is a bit of a joke in most cases.

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It’s no secret. There’s no place for them to play next season. They have to go somewhere else next summer — for at least one summer. I would guess that it would be Tucson.

Now that could be one summer or forever. Most likely forever. My guess would be that if the team isn’t for sale now it soon will be. And not a day goes by that some old-time baseball fan doesn’t send me an email or call me, begging me to help keep the team here. And to complain about “Merritt Paulson moving the team out of town.”

Sorry, I’m not going to go there. For one thing, all Paulson has tried to do is get this community to build a long-overdue ballpark. And he’s offered to put $10 million of his own money to help do it — way more than most minor-league team owners would do.

The place the Beavers have been playing since the mid-1950s was never a ballpark. It’s a stadium, always best fit for football rather than baseball — from that first day in 1956, when as a little kid I watched the team try to shoehorn itself into a configuration that for fans and players, never did make much sense.

There have been a couple of tries to make it a better facility for baseball but the wrong plan was always chosen and always failed. I have no nostalgic feelings about PGE Park, Civic Stadium or Multnomah Stadium — whatever you want to call it — and I have spent more time in that facility than just about anyone in this area. I worked there for years, from the time I was 13 years old picking up bats, all the way through college as a front-office employee and then as a writer covering teams.

It’s a cold, uncomfortable venue that in and of itself has done more to turn people off to baseball than any promoter or team that has ever played there. I wish those attempting to convert it into yet another type of stadium the best of luck. I hope it works. But it was never going to work as a ballpark.

And this city’s continued failure to recognize the need for even a medium-sized home for a professional baseball team no longer bothers me, either. I mean, at a certain point you just accept the fact that this is what we are as a city — a place unlike just about any other major city in the world.

Believe it or not, other cities everywhere recognize the value of pro sports to a community and what they bring. Not just monetarily but culturally. I don’t think we ever will get that here — we think, as a city, we’re too smart for that. We ask the Paulsons of the world to build their own arenas and stadiums. And they don’t. We got lucky when Paul Allen did it and we aren’t going to get that lucky again. Nobody else is that rich or that stupid.

There are too many other places who will build arenas or stadiums for these owners. Is that the right thing for a city? Who is to say. It’s just the way it’s done, folks. You want to be in the game, you spend the money. All other cities do it and don’t look back.

The price, really, is so inconsequential compared to the money thrown away on other stuff that you don’t even notice it. Or maybe you do. Fact is, at a certain point of living here all your life, you just lose patience with the whole concept.

I’ve pretty much given up on Portland ever realizing its potential as a city. Not just as a sports town but as a major city. The lack of understanding about what it takes to keep a city healthy and vibrant business-wise is appalling. The misplaced faith in our politicians has betrayed us over and over. There’s been a leadership vacuum here for decades.

And what’s always bothered me is not that we’re lost, it’s that most people here don’t even realize how lacking in direction we are. We have no leaders and no plan.

Bike paths are not a destination, folks. They’re a distraction on the way to one. Trolleys are an expensive and very slow ride to nowhere. But in this city, it’s always seemed that the journey matters more than the destination. That’s the way it works when you have no idea where you’re going.

Welcome to Portland, the city that doesn’t work. And hasn’t for years.

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And as one commenter pointed out, if there truly is a hotel problem in Portland, just bring a cruise ship up the river, dock it right there downtown and take care of everyone. It would be kind of fun.

And if it was good enough for the Super Bowl in Jacksonville it would certainly take care of the All-Star Game in Portland.

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I’m sure you saw this story about Orlando landing the 2012 NBA All-Star Game. It’s the second time the Magic have played host to the game since it came into the league.

Meanwhile, Portland remains one of the few teams in the league to never have played host to the game — which sticks in the craw of a lot of long-time Portlanders. Oh, I know, when you talk to the Trail Blazers they’ll tell you that the lack of hotel space, or the lack of a huge headquarters hotel in the vicinity of the arena, means Portland CANNOT host it.

That’s an impediment, but seriously — it’s just the easy excuse for the league and the team. The simple fact is, the Blazers quit bidding for the game years ago. They really haven’t wanted it. Many NBA teams have no interest in staging the game. It is a major pain in the backside.

I don’t think the Blazers have had any interest in messing around with all the details and distractions that the All-Star Weekend can bring to a franchise. The only entity that really benefits from the event is the city itself, with all the visitors and attention in can bring to a community.

There are two real reasons for a team to chase that game. The first is that you’re having trouble selling season tickets and you need the game to spark interest in your NBA team. You can even include tickets to the game or the Saturday circus of events as part of a season-ticket package. This reason is much less common than it used to be, mainly because the hosting teams just don’t get all that many tickets anymore. The league sucks most of them up for its bigwigs and VIPs.

The best reason to want the game now is that it’s major leverage in your community. If you need some juice with the mayor or city council in getting a new arena built or renovated, you can promise the All-Star Game — and often the local political hacks will fall all over themselves to help you. The game does bring major revenue into town and also brings plenty of attention to a community.

For politicians, it doesn’t get any better than that.

OK, so let’s fast-forward to our situation in Portland. Right now in the Rose Quarter, three different groups are trying to win the right to develop the area — including the Trail Blazers’ Jumptown proposal. The basketball team is the favorite in the process, by the way. The Blazers usually get what they want around here, as all of us who wanted to see Memorial Coliseum turned into a showplace for a beautiful minor-league baseball stadium know by now.

But if you’re the City Council and the mayor’s office, the least you can do is extract a commitment from the Trail Blazers that they’ll do ALL they can to get an All-Star Game in Portland in return for the rights to developing Jumptown. It would be a nice way to open that neighborhood when and if it ever does get built.

And honestly, hotel rooms or not — and with all the damn trolleys and trains running around this town, our hotels are all accessible from the Rose Quarter — this town DESERVES an NBA All-Star Game. And the Blazers damn well ought to start bidding for it again.

The league owes us one and so does the team. I cannot believe our “city fathers” — and in the case of Portland even using that old term is pretty hilarious — haven’t pressured the team to make it happen by now. Well, I CAN believe it because the level of naivete around City Hall when it comes to sports has never been higher.

But the mayor, city council and everyone else in a position to have a say about developing that Rose Quarter area should make sure they do all they can to get past the BS and hold the Trail Blazers accountable for bringing the game here.

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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.

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All I really know for sure is that the landlord apparently changed the locks on all the doors because the lounge was behind in its rent payments. This was the site of “Talkin’ Ball” on Comcast Sportsnet and we had to move the last show over to the Blazers’ studio in the Rose Garden, which is a great locale.

I’m not sure where we’re going to be doing future shows but rest assured we will be continuing that series, although there are no shows scheduled after the next two games.

I would ask that you keep your comments civil in regard to The Agency.  This was NOT a national chain. A lot of very nice Portlanders spent a good deal of money to try bring this town a place they thought was needed. A lot of very nice people worked there, too.

My sympathies and best wishes go out to them.

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Here’s your link to the website. The plan also includes “a bright future for Memorial Coliseum.” That promise right there might be enough to make the project difficult to pull off.

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Merritt Paulson is trying to get a ballpark. He’s trying to see if some community in this area is willing to build a real baseball stadium in a public-private partnership. You realize, perhaps, that the ONLY stadium or arena of any size that this area’s ever built with public funds is Memorial Coliseum — which was done about a half century ago.

The Rose Garden, PGE Park (Multnomah Stadium when it was built), Vaughn Street Ballpark — all were done privately. My point is, we’re kind of due, aren’t we, to do some sort of arena or ballpark?

Anyway, Paulson, who had no connections here, moved into the area when he bought the Portland Beavers and Timbers and is in love with owning pro sports franchises. He’s been villified, made fun of and derided because he’s asked the public to help fund a ballpark that IT will own.

He’s willing to pour millions of his own money into this operation. Millions. And for anyone who thinks he’s got a great chance of even earning all that money back, well, you’re nuts. I just don’t think it pencils out. The fact is, he’s a wealthy guy who loves owning and operating a sports franchise.

Just like Paul Allen.

But Paul’s taken a lot of hits over the years, too. Yet the contributions the Trail Blazers have made to this community are too many to count. Seriously, with all of our job and economic problems here, the constant rain and the idiocy of some of our politicians, it’s the only thing a lot of people find themselves feeling good about when they pick up the morning paper.

And you know what? Paul has lost tens hundreds of millions on the Trail Blazers. Can you imagine? It’s never been a profitable operation. The people of Portland owe him a standing ovation every time he walks to his seat in that arena. Has he made mistakes? Of course, and we’ve always called him out on them. But on balance, Paul Allen has been GREAT for the city of Portland.

Traditionally, we’ve not had wealthy people who live in our area step up to own franchises. The closest I can come is Harry Glickman, but he wasn’t rich enough to own the team — he just was farsighted and creative enough to put a group together that had enough financial clout to buy a team in the NBA.

I think Merritt Paulson is trying very hard to be great for the Portland area, too. Certainly, to anyone who believes he’s here to make his fortune is sadly mistaken. If they think that ballpark in Beaverton is going to benefit only Paulson, they’re seriously deluded.

That ballpark will be a gathering place and a focal point for Beaverton that the city has never had. An identity and a soul. Just wait. What really bothers me is the whole political side to this. Some people don’t like Paulson’s father, Hank, the former secretary of the treasury, so they don’t like his kid. I mean, man, the guy was a REPUBLICAN — which is pretty much always a crime around these parts. And man, he’s from the EAST COAST! How terrible.

All I’m saying is that we ought to be thankful that people like Paul Allen and Merritt Paulson have chosen Portland as the home for their teams. Nobody around here is wealthy enough or willing enough to do it.

And we’re better off for what they’ve done.

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My lifelong friend, Mike Clopton, and I stood on a street corner across the street from the left-field entrance to Safeco Field Thursday afternoon, getting ready to duck into a quiet little place called “Jimmy’s” where we’d watch Ian Furness do his talk show live on KJR.

The Mariners were playing a rare 3:40 game and I hesitated before ducking into the joint. On one side of me was Safeco Field, a glimmering baseball oasis on a perfect sunny afternoon. On the other side was a meeting hall and theater, attached to Qwest Field, where the Seahawks play — another most impressive structure.

The streets were alive with happy people. Families, business people ducking out on work, singles, senior citizens — people who seemed giddy about what their afternoon promised them. Even the scalpers had smiles on their faces.

What a town, man. Yes, Seattle lost its NBA team. Cry no tears — with the NFL and major-league baseball, it’s barely noticed.

When I was a kid, Seattle and Portland were heated rivals in just about every way. They had the Rainiers in the Pacific Coast League fighting our Beavers and the Totems in the Western Hockey League always losing to our Buckaroos. Those were the days.

But then the Kingdome went up and Seattle became a big-league city. While we were focusing on keeping it weird, they were concentrating on pennant races and dreaming of Super Bowls. They haven’t won a World Series or Super Bowl yet, but they are allowed to think about it every year. They paid the price of admission — in erecting beautiful public facilities that, yes, probably cost too much money.

But I hear no complaints as I stand on that corner. You never hear any around here. I see excited people headed to the ballpark to watch what turned into a honey of a game. As Mike and I alternated between great seats behind home plate, an inning in the press box and about four innings in the owner’s suite (Thanks to an all-time great guy, Randy Adamack), I couldn’t help but reflect.

Right there within a block of each other, twice as many sports facilities as the city of Portland has built since that coin toss when the little settlement on the Willamette became “Portland” rather than “Boston.”

It’s a shame we quit being Seattle’s rival. It’s a shame we didn’t dare to dream big. What fun we could have had in this town.

But I will say one thing for us. We’ve got Memorial Coliseum on the National Register of Historic Places. Those idiots up there in Seattle, who probably could have done the same thing with the Kingdome had they been smart enough, decided instead to implode it to make way for a gorgeous, state-of-the-art football stadium.

Fools. Don’t they know you’re supposed to keep old, disgusting, worn-out dumps like the Kingdome around and sink even more dough into them? I mean, that could have been an athletic club or a velodrome, right?

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People have been asking me, what with the Phoenix franchise in such a mess, why isn’t somebody trying to buy that team and move it to Portland?

Well first, the economic times wouldn’t dictate any more big-league teams heading to Portland. No corporate support here right now. But second, the NHL has a HUGE investment in keeping that team right where it is — in its fancy new arena out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t think the league wants Portland or any other city trying to get that franchise.

That’s why the league is even willing to buy the team for a year or so, just to buy time to find an owner willing to keep the team where it is. You see, any league wants to push the myth out there that when the taxpayers fund a new arena, it not only gets them a team — it ensures they keep that team there for the long term.

Moving that hockey team now, just after the construction of a new arena, would look bad all over the league and perhaps discourage other communities from building fancy new arenas.

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