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Baseball is more than a game
The political leaders shrugging at Portland's bid for a baseball team are overlooking its economic benefits
From the Editorial Staff
The Oregonian
Sunday, May 23, 2004

When it comes to bidding for a Major League Baseball team, Portland's political leadership has come to resemble the Peanuts gang.

Mayor Vera Katz is in the role of Charlie Brown, the determined player-manager who keeps pitching while the rest of the kids -- including mayoral finalists and born right-fielders Jim Francesconi and Tom Potter -- chatter in the outfield, wave to the fans and hope for rain.

The Peanuts gang has never won a game. The way it's going, Portland isn't likely to win one, either. Major League Baseball won't be hot to come to a city where its next mayor and newest councilman sniff at the idea of a team bringing hundreds of jobs, a huge payroll and a facility that would draw tens of thousands of fans into downtown for at least 81 games a year.

Major League Baseball would be more than just a game in Portland. It would be more than another minor-league club struggling at PGE Park. It would be a big-league economic jolt, a significant addition to the city's culture and image and an enormous source of entertainment and fun.

It's amazing that we and others have to keep making the argument that Major League Baseball would be good for Portland. Just look around at cities similar either in size or ambition to Portland -- Denver, Seattle, Phoenix, Cleveland. Every one has reaped economic benefits from their downtown stadiums. Every one is plenty glad it has a baseball team in town.

At this point, Portland may not have a real chance at the Montreal Expos. It's possible the cynics are right, and Portland is being used as a stalking horse by a league eager to set communities against one another and watch them ratchet up their public investments in new stadiums.

Yet Portland must play this game if it ever wants to win a big-league team, either the Expos or one of the other teams rumored to be interested in relocating years down the road.

The conventional, hangdog wisdom in Portland and Oregon is that this city has far too many problems to flirt with baseball. The logic goes this way: The economy is down, Portland can barely keep its schools open, families are going hungry. This is no time to get involved in a silly game.

In fact, Katz, the many businesspeople and the others involved in Portland's bid for the Expos have crafted a plan to pay for a stadium without using general tax dollars, or taking one dime from existing public services.

Furthermore, a big-league baseball team would be Oregon's largest economic development project. There's no other business now interested in Oregon that would generate this many jobs. There's no other construction project this large on the horizon.

More than 1,500 construction workers would be needed to build the stadium. A ballclub would employ hundreds of people. Other businesses would fill in around a downtown stadium. Baseball advocates project that a Portland team would produce more than $110 million in revenue during its first three seasons in a new ballpark.

However you feel about baseball, that's not peanuts.