Another opening day in the Rose City
by The Cactus Leaguer
March 30, 2008

Tonight, President Bush will be throwing out the opening pitch at a new stadium for a team that came close to moving to Portland a few short years ago (I doubt if Bush would have thrown out the first pitch in Portland, but that's another story). Hope springs eternal as fans buy tickets, debate the steroid issue, and plan their fantasy league drafts. And of course, tomorrow morning, I will be making "The Slog" up to Seattle for my 8th consecutive opening day at Safeco Field.

On the surface, Major League Baseball in Portland (MLB2PDX) looks as distant of a dream as ever. With the Oakland A's (the only team without a long term lease) putting the finishing touches on a move to nearby Fremont, no team is likely to relocate in the next 20 years.

Expansion appears to be highly unlikely as well. Major League Baseball is in the middle of rapid revenue growth (vertically, via new media opportunities) and is under no urgency to expand horizontally. Put it this way: if you owned stock that you knew was going to keep climbing dramatically, would you sell it now, or wait until the price leveled off?

That being said, all is not lost. Portland, in its heart, is a baseball town, in the same mold as Boston or Cincinnati, even though it doesn't realize it yet. And the same characteristics that made Portland a finalist for the Expos will only grow stronger over the next decade.

Understanding that MLB2PDX is not happening in the short term, here is what I believe needs to take place in order for MLB to arrive in the Rose City sometime in the next five to ten years:

- Expansion must be viable – for expansion to occur, MLB needs to be motivated to do so, and they need at least two feasible candidates. If and when media revenues flatten out, expansion from 30 to 32 teams may be the logical next step for the league to grow revenues. And with middle markets such as Portland and San Antonio continuing to grow, workable options should exist in the near future.
- Portland must be viable - Portland must be a healthy market from day one. We must keep growing faster than the nation as whole, both economically and in terms of population. Downturns would be damaging, and market saturation (adding the NHL and MLS combined, for example) would also make Portland a tougher sell.
- The political environment must be viable – once upon a time, a young Paul Allen paid for a new arena for the Trailblazers, but those fairy tale days are long gone (even for Allen – ask Seahawk fans). Portland is stingy when it comes to stadium funding, but it is more than generous when it comes to monetizing development rights, which is the new form of currency in stadium developments. A well planned stadium district anchored near the Rose Quarter and Convention Center could be terrific addition to the city core with minimal impact on taxpayers.
- Finally, we will need an attitude towards baseball that was best expressed to me in a recent article by Bill Simmons of ESPN:

quote:

Nobody has ever summed up being a sports fan better than the New Yorker's Roger Angell in his piece "Agincourt and After," in this passage about Carlton Fisk's famous home run in the 1975 World Series:

quote:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

I will be thinking of this "infantile and ignoble joy", about what might have been, and what could be, as I take my annual sojourn to Safeco Field tomorrow.