Will Portland Swing For Baseball?

I, on behalf of Portlanders, would sure like Major League Baseball.

Everyone likes or has heard of the Tampa Bay Rays and the Oakland Athletics. Landing either is a fun idea, and I hear they’re itching to move.

The Athletics or Rays can be Portland’s baseball darling, but for now we don’t care because we’re without. The Seattle Mariners aren’t ours.

Oakland — incidentally, my favorite team — can stay in the American League West, and Athletics-Mariners is as fun as Portland Timbers-Seattle Sounders.

The Rays would likely join the AL West and create an MLB paradise on the MAX line in the heart of downtown.

The University of Oregon and Oregon State University baseball teams play Civil War games in front of alumni and fans at Providence Park. Why not stuff a major league team into the 22,000-seat stadium — at least for right now — so you can show that baseball works here? You can write up the finances for a new site or put a whole lot more seats into Providence Park.

With that comes West Coast baseball money. If Oregon wants the love it wants and the money it needs, baseball is the answer. Milwaukee, Cleveland and Cincinnati are huge in the world of MLB. Portland can use the boost.

“Portland is truly one of the hidden gems in the entire country,” Rant Sports’ Seth Lassen said. “It’s a beautiful city with a population over two million, and the closest current MLB team is 174 miles away. It’s an affluent city that loves sports, and the NBA’s Trail Blazers and MLS’s Timbers are the only true competition an MLB franchise would need to deal with.”

If the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders end up in Los Angeles like I hope they do, Portland — since I can only dream of an NFL team here — needs baseball to stay relevant. Without it, the Rose City is small-time.

It’s way different from when Portland put in for the Montreal Expos — now the Washington Nationals — in 2005 because the Expos were a failing team in Eastern Canada. If Portland’s new baseball team were a loser, it would be a loveable loser, as the Portland Trail Blazers often are. The very new Hillsboro Hops and Portland Thunder get all kinds of love, and everyone loves the winning Portland Winterhawks. The Timbers Army is its own sensation.

A major league team would electrify life and times downtown.

Said Kerry Eggers of the Portland Tribune quoting architect and real estate broker Barry Smith, “‘Our biggest problem has been that nobody knows about Portland. Every time we have visitors come here, they go nuts. We pick them up, take them on light rail, have lunch, look over the city and talk about the possibilities.’”

If an owner likes Portland enough, he’ll make it happen. It’s up to fans like us to catch his attention.