Bringing Baseball To Portland

It is Saturday, the sun is out, and Jeld-Wen Field is empty. The Timbers don’t have a game today, but the Portland Beavers would have.

Minor league baseball has been an “on again, off again” part of Portland since 1903, but the most recent stand started in 2001. The team moved from Albuquerque, becoming the Beavers, as the San Diego Padres affiliate. Civic Stadium renovated and renamed PGE Park as part of the return of the Beavers. The renovations included new turf, new lower bowl seats, luxury boxes, and field boxes just to name a few. The stadium still looked run down, but if you ever saw Civic Stadium, the renovations were huge. The old Civic Stadium turf was like carpet, with seams that would make the ball dance if it hit one. Also, the addition of luxury boxes gave promise that the team would be here for a long time.

In 2007, Merritt Paulson bought both the Beavers and Timbers. Right away, Paulson wanted to make changes to the Beavers. He wanted to change the name of the team to prevent association or confusion with the Oregon State Beavers. He put it up to vote on the team’s website and when the Portland Beavers prevailed, he announced the color scheme change from red, black, and white to San Diego Padres blue and a less than pleasing tan.

Attendance continued to drop, and rumors that Paulson planned to sell the team didn’t help. The high point of the Beavers, under Paulson’s ownership, was the 2009 Triple-A All-Star game, which sold out PGE Park.

In 2010, it was official: the team was being sold if they couldn’t find a home in Portland. The Beavers were being evicted from PGE Park to make way for the MLS Portland Timbers. I was in attendance for the last game of Paulson’s Beavers. It was an emotional game, and drew an almost sold out crowd. It was an emotional day for all of the Beavers faithful, and the Beavers came from behind to win their last game.

Baseball will be back in the Portland area eventually, with suburbs like Hillsboro and Milwaukie bidding for teams.

Both cities are looking for smaller teams that would play in the Single-A level, in leagues like the Northwest League, the same league that the Portland Rockies used to play in.

Both cities proposed building multi-purpose stadiums that would seat around 4,500 people.

Hillsboro would pay Hoffman Construction up to $13.4 million to build the stadium at the Gordon Faber Recreation Complex. It is estimated that the stadium would bring in $7 million each year, while not raising property taxes, yet Milwaukie is the front runner.

Milwaukie’s stadium would be a better location because the stadium would be a five minute walk away from the future Tacoma Street and Milwaukie Main Street light rail stations. Also, Milwaukie is making a greater push for a team than Hillsboro, who hasn’t even set a deadline for a team.

But all is for not if a team does not agree to move to Milwaukie by July 31, the project will end, and minor league baseball will continue to be absent in the Portland area.

Another place of concern is that Northwest League President, Bob Richmond, will not allow teams to be so close in market. Although the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes are “close”, my thought process is, if the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers can share the same building, then two or three Single-A teams should be able to share the general area of Portland.

Hopefully we’ll have another minor league team the city will love.  It won’t be a MLB team but if we can rally behind the Portland Winterhawks and the pre-MLS Timbers, why not a baseball team?

Until then, we’ll all just watch the Mariners lose … unless King Felix is pitching.