Dreamy in Portland

Up in Oregon, folks actually want a piece of baseball
Posted: Tuesday May 21, 2002 12:04 PM



You can empty out an entire stadium these days by whispering two simple words: "Labor fight." Mention "players' strike" or "lockout" and things start looking like the streets of L.A. in The Omega Man.

So, with all the "unrest" (aaah, run for your lives!) in this once Grand Old Game, you have to wonder what the heck Portland -- the one in Oregon -- is thinking. This is a city, nice as can be (evidently), that actually wants a piece of Major League Baseball.

It's like coveting a case of athlete's foot. What the heck does a nice not-so-little town like Portland want with baseball?

"You can't assume," says Dr. G. Lynn Lashbrook, a sports agent, professor, former college athletic administrator, president and founder of Sports-Management.com and founder of the Oregon Baseball Campaign, "it'll be a mess forever."

Well, sure you can. Baseball has a pretty good track record for being pretty screwed up. Still, there are a lot of people in Portland, population something more than 2.2 million, thinking that, somehow, things will get better for baseball.

For years now, Lashbrook and others have practically been banking on it. They've been jumping up and down and waving their arms frantically, hoping the baseball barons would look their way. Portlanders, if indeed that's what they're called, believe they have a major league town in waiting.

According to the Portland Oregon Sports Authority, Portland is the biggest city in the U.S. without a major league baseball team (the folks in Portland include Washington D.C. in the Baltimore market, which I'm sure the people in Northern Virginia might not, but that's quibbling). Portland is the 22nd-largest metro area in the nation, bigger than Cincinnati, Kansas City and Milwaukee, each of which has some semblance of a Major League Baseball team.

The people of Portland are baseball watchers, too. POSA claims MLB games shown in Portland have a higher rating than those in at least eight Major League Baseball cities.

All of these are reasons that Lashbrook, and so many others, say Portland will make a terrific big league city someday.

All of those are reasons we say ... run!

Run like the Wrigley wind. Run like Barry Bonds caught you sitting in his chair. Run, we say, like Carl Pohlad does when the auditor rings his doorbell.

You don't want the headaches, the heartbreak, the heartburn from the $7 hot dogs. You don't want the hassles.

"The reality is, if other teams are out there making it in cities smaller than we are," says Drew Mahalic, the chief executive officer of POSA, "we have no doubt that Major League Baseball would do well [here]."

My goodness, have these guys been paying attention? Haven't they heard of competitive imbalance? The whole small-revenue, large-revenue dynamic? Do they know the average salary of a player is somewhere around $2 million a year? Have they never heard of the Devil Rays?

"This is all assuming they'll fix it, 'cause it has to be fixed," Lashbrook concedes. "And it is going to be fixed. It might be ugly. But it is going to be fixed."

That, right there, is the beauty behind this whole Portland idea. The Portlanders -- I looked it up -- figure that, somehow, this current labor unrest results in a better game. Granted, it might take a strike or a lockout or some legal maneuvering that would make Johnnie Cochran's jaw drop.

But they're figuring that, somehow, the owners and players will agree on some sort of revenue sharing, maybe something that slows down salaries. They're figuring that will put the K.C.s and Cincinnatis and Portlands on even financial and competitive footing with the Yankees and Red Sox.

They're hoping that this "contraction" thing (yikes, head for the hills!) is blocked by the courts, or shot down by an arbitrator, or taken off the bargaining table, and that suddenly the Minnesota Twins get their stadium, and the Expos can't go back to Montreal, and they can't go to D.C. because of all the problems in getting a team into the Orioles' backyard, and everyone knows you can't contract just one team, so suddenly there's a team available with no place to play and ...

The people of Portland plan to be sitting there waiting when the thing comes out the other end, all shiny and new and purring like a kitten.

Sure, it's a dream. That's what this whole thing is about.

"At the end of the day, it's all about catching a baseball," says Lashbrook, a guy who named his son after a baseball player. "This is all about baseball."

The truth is, the whole thing with Portland may work out. Portland might get the funding for a new major league stadium, something Lashbrook and Mahalic and others haven't yet been able to nail down. An ownership group, another current shortcoming, may surface. Did you know, according to POSA, that it rains less in Portland than it does in Atlanta, Baltimore or Houston?

So you never know. Someday -- maybe even someday in the next year or so -- Portland could be a Major League Baseball city. It could happen.

A fair warning, though. By then, it'll be way too late to run.

John Donovan is a senior writer for CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.