West Coast baseball gets far less love and attention than East Coast baseball. This has moved past the realm of opinion and is squarely rooted in fact. Never mind that a West Coast team has won three of the last five World Series; teams closer to the Atlantic Ocean receive more air time on ESPN, MLB Network and the Internet than those closer to the Pacific.
As a result, most cities on this side of the country are dismissed as viable options when Major League Baseball starts teasing its fanbase with the concept of expansion. City names like Charlotte, New Orleans and Montreal are all bandied about as places that could soon have their own MLB team. One town that gets mentioned often (and dismissed quickly) is Portland. Even though it brings many of the same cultural and travel issues as Seattle, a Major League Baseball team could be the last thing Portland needs to finally be respected as a modern metropolis.
First of all, Portland is a hub of activity. People flock from all over the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere on a frequent basis to experience all that the place has to offer. Like the Mariners and other West Coast teams, the town’s relative proximity to Asia makes it appealing to the increasingly rabid baseball fans in Japan and beyond. Of course, there’s always the local fans to worry about (and coax into coming to games/buying team-issued merchandise…)
In that same vein, Portland has already proven it can sustain and support teams in other sports, as the Trail Blazers can attest. The town has had multiple Minor League Baseball teams in the past, most notably the Mavericks, who are the subject of a terrific Netflix documentary entitled The Battered Bastards of Baseball. Clearly, the demand and desire for a team is still there. If they can find a prospective owner who could fund a stadium rather than putting the burden on the taxpayers, all the better.
Of course, you can’t just add one team to 30 and call it an expansion. It’s likely that one of the aforementioned eastern cities (or a completely different place not mentioned here) will also get a team, bringing the grand total to 32. Some restructuring would become necessary, but I can’t imagine even the most stringent baseball fan would argue with two divisions in either league with eight teams each. As far as the playoff structure in that scenario: The top three teams in each division make the playoffs, with the first place team receiving a bye before facing the winner of the second place-third place matchup. From there, the winner in each division faces the winner of the adjacent one before facing their counterparts in the other league in the World Series. Everybody wins. You know, except for the 31 teams every year that don’t.
Nothing about this idea is novel or authentic. That being said, Portland needs to be high on the list once the baseball gods decide to add more fodder to the cannons. Hell, the bad athletic blood with Seattle is already built in, no need to shoe-horn a rivalry like Astros-Rangers. Maybe then, sports in the PNW will get a little more respect.
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