Crying about the Beavers last game at PGE Park, the Oregonian’s frumpiest sports columnist, John Canzano, considers a minor-league baseball team necessary “infrastructure” and transportation plans “silly” and “visionless.”
Guilty, too, is the visionless City Council. That’s you Nick Fish, Dan Saltzman, Amanda Fritz. Tinkers to Evers to Chance, they ain’t. Fellow city Commissioner Randy Leonard stood alone, pushing to create jobs and build a ballpark, against a wall of apathy. The other commissioners, and the mayor who ran on a platform that promised new ideas, instead sat in the shadows, shrugging atone another, afraid to ask Portland to act like a major city.
Oh, we have an aerial tram, that ran four times ($57 million) the original budget. And we have those silly bike lanes and a $613 million Portland Bicycle Plan. But what Portland doesn’t have after today is a Triple-A baseball team playing in a ballpark where you can bring your family. A piece of the infrastructure of a city just got ripped out.
I’ll think about that every time I see the underused bike lanes and that blasted empty tram running overhead. And you should never forget the names of the politicians who were on watch the next time you go to cast a vote. Adams — Fritz — Saltzman and Fish. As dreams for the city go, that’s some Murderer’s Row.
What kind of city does Portland want to be?
All this sensationalist, anti-bike, sports as “infrastructure” B.S. aside, Canzano’s argument crumbles in that we’re essentially trading a minor-league baseball team for a major-league soccer team. If I accepted the notion that sports franchises determine a city’s direction—which I don’t—wouldn’t embracing soccer, the global sport, over baseball, a withering, 20th century American mess, show “vision” in an ever-flattening world?
Pining for minor-league baseball is like longing for the days of black and white TV, when you walked uphill both ways to school. Sorry Gramps, but you can’t put lipstick on conservatism and call it vision.
“wouldn’t embracing soccer, the global sport, over baseball, a withering, 20th century American mess, show “vision” in an ever-flattening world”
God job cribbing from Thom Friedman, epic fail on understanding sports,
“I’ll think about that every time I see the underused bike lanes and that blasted empty tram running overhead.”
I’m looking for a source for the original ridership projections, but that “empty tram” now carries about double the original projected ridership. (And way more than WES commuter rail, which cost more, just for ballpark (cough cough) comparison.)
In fact, the Tram serves more people on an average daily basis than any ballpark. (Ballparks sit empty a lot of the time. That’s OK, nothing inherently wrong with ballparks. But why pick a fight with bikes and trams?)
As someone who grew up with perpetually underfunded school programs such as music, while sports programs were (for the most part) adequately funded, it’s difficult for me to muster sympathy for a ballpark. However, I’m still generally supportive of the idea. But insulting other completely unrelated things which I care about (like bike lanes) is no way to persuade me to support a ballpark.
Portland hates baseball and so do I. F*ck Uncle Fester, if he wants a baseball stadium pay for it yourself you prick.
This post would be fine if it didn’t sidestep the fundamental truth that soccer sucks my sasquatch taint. Also, this nonsense about embracing “the global sport” is garbage. We shouldn’t do something just because Heineken doesn’t have to make custom ads for our area any more. I know ye all think it’s really neat and special to embrace soccer, but once you move around the world you’ll see how white bread and boring it is. Getting all amped about it like it’s some kind of alternative sport that only cool people know about shows an appalling ignorance of the rest of the world.[/whiskey]
Ageism. Really? That’s what you have left. Somehow connecting one’s age with one’s politics?
Pitty you couldn’t explain that to all those kids at the final game today. They would be interested in your little theory.
With no little irony, your sad attempt at commentary merely betrays . . . well . . . your age.
The reason that no one cares that the Beavers don’t have anywhere to play is because no one went to the games. 99% of Portlanders will never notice that the Beavers aren’t playing anymore. Minor league basesball is pretty much the boringest thing in the world. It’s something to ignore while sitting in an uncomfortable chair and eating hot dogs and drinking beer.
If you really want to talk about terrible writing Andrew, you need look no further than your own posts.
Blogtown shudders every time it sees your by-line.
Beavers average attendance this year: 4,000, worst in thie league. The real travesty is that they were allowed to use that stadium at all.
Poor sports journalism. It’s a dwindling mosh-pit of rapidly-aging men in despair. You want minor league baseball? Lobby for it in your suburbs. That’s where you all live, and where 95% of the fan-base lives.
@Graham +1.
This Canzano article confused me because he kept talking about us losing infrastructure… but I thought the Beavers and the Timbers played at the same spot. And so like I doubt the spot is going anywhere. We’re losing a team, not a stadium. Maybe I’m missing something…
The beavers left Portland? CRAP
“What kind of city does Portland want to be?”
The kind where you can get around town just fine without a car. A more admirable vision would be hard to find.
It’s a shame to see baseball go, even though I might have, maaaaybe seen one game in the last five years. But if only for sentimental reasons, I like having baseball around; I like that baseball fans have a place to watch the game.
I also like silly bike lanes. So if we’re going to get all zero-sum-game about it: People can and do use bike lanes and the OHSU tram to get to jobs, so to act like these are trivial things compared to a baseball stadium is divorced from reality.
“Underused” and “empty” would seem to be far more descriptive of a stadium hosting a Beavers game. Where were the fans? Were they down at city hall waving “build it” signs? I really don’t know, but if they couldn’t be bothered to show up for games, I’m guessing not.
And a really easy Google search turns up this:
http://www.ohsu.edu/ohsuedu/newspub/releas…
“A total of 125,158 people rode the Portland Aerial Tram in February, nearly twice the 66,000 one-way riders expected based on preliminary projections.”
It’s from 2007, but I see no reason to expect this has changed much.
If that’s the same tram Canzano is calling “empty,” I hope for his sake he never becomes an umpire.
This column was so dumb that I created an Oregonlive account just to berate Canzano and write a 2 page angry comment.
In a shocking turn of events, a sports columnist for a mediocre paper isn’t exactly the smartest guy ever.
Actually, does the O have any decent content anymore that isn’t ripped from AP or NYT?
If Canzano really thinks the bike lanes are the emptiest thing in that article, he’s either:
1) never seen a bike lane during commute times.
2) never been to a Beavers game.
Also, fun fact I just noticed:
The title on the printed version of the story mentions kicking dust on Adams’ “Loafers,” instead of his shoes. I know the Oregonian does this from time to time (The “thickets” of lies is what I particularly remember) but any ideas as to why specifically the title was changed, post-publication?
Huh. Wouldn’t it be better to have more than one sport drawing a diversity of fans into the city rather than loosing one for another that just happens to be really popular right now?
I’m sad that baseball is leaving PDX. I’m even more sad that for some reason footballers and baseball fans have to be such dicks to one another. Love your sport. Go ahead. But you don’t have to tear someone else’s down.
I feel bad that I’ll have to drive to Seattle to take my kid to a ballgame. My hope would be that we could see both sports in the same city. This shit doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
And as for a “Withering 20th Century American mess”? Go say that in any city with a Major League ball team and see how it plays.
Sometimes I wish Portlander’s could see beyond their faux-European idealism and have some fucking perspective.
Didn’t Canzano advocate for the ridiculous decision to convert the stadium from dual use to single use? It was in part his articles that allowed Paulson to get exactly what he wanted, a stadium that perfectly met his MLS needs and a baseball team to use to wring more money out of a second city. This was his plan all along and the only mistake the city made was in allowing him to do it. 5 years from now when he decides PDX is too small a market for his MLS team and moves it somewhere else we will be left with a large stadium that has zero anchor tenants instead of 2. Also Canzano where were you when the Lumberjax were folding?
I like bike lanes as much as the next PDXer, but $613 million seems insane. Is that figure for real?
@PAC: You can take your kid to a basketball game, a soccer match or a hockey game. Just not baseball. You can’t have it all.
Define “single use”. The park will be made more suitable for soccer, football and concert use. Critics keep conveniently overlooking the tremendously beneficial aspects this renovation will provide for the PSU Vikings, who may be able to leverage a better stadium into entry into the WAC, a BCS conference.
To talk about Paulson’s plan to get rid of the Beavers is plainly ignorant. The entity that purchased the Beavers and Timbers in 2007 was Shortstop, LLC. No one sets out to take the shit he did for proposing a new park in Lents of all godforsaken places if it’s just a dastardly smokescreen to justify selling a franchise. Not to mention that it’s already widely rumored at this point that Paulson will sell the Beavers for roughly the same price as he purchased. It’s difficult to hold out for more money when the other side of the table knows you have to sell.
If Paulson decides to move the team, or MLS spontaneously goes bankrupt (my other favorite trope), the Paulson family have guaranteed rent payments for the stadium for the next 25 years. So the City will still be receiving money, the Viks will still have their refurbished stadium, and someone with a surname more palatable to the excitable classes can take a run at owning a franchise.
Canzano’s article has plenty poorly researched opinions on infrastructure. No doubt about that. On one half of his article he’s dead on. Portland thinks like a small town. Major League Baseball won’t come here until the city is willing to cough up a $500 million dollar stadium. Minor League baseball isn’t coming back until the city will cough up a $45 million dollar stadium. Oh well. I think the $8.5 million the city actually paid for the tram was worth it and I’m all for the bike lanes even though I probably won’t ever use them as much as I should.
Aaaaand that’s why he’s a sports columnist at an imploding middle-market newspaper.
Give it six months, a default, and a couple repos and he’ll be riding a rickety mountain bike to the tram to a gig as a data entry temp.
@PAC,
Over half MLB teams have under half-capacity average attendance. The bottom 25% is probably operating at 25% capacity. A great majority of them are hemorrhaging money.
Your sunshine-y take on baseball doesn’t mesh with reality.
Also, no need to go all the way to Seattle for baseball. You can check out minor league game in Salem, Eugene and Tacoma. Have fun!
The soccer World Cup final this summer got a bigger TV audience in the US than any recent World Series. By completely dumping baseball for soccer, Portland is once again ahead of the already-underway process happening nationwide. Baseball is slowly but surely returning to being the sport of the NE, where only people in New York and Boston (and a few transplants elsewhere) actually give a shit.
@Daaaaave – The WAC is not a BCS conference. That’s why Boise State just left it for the Mountain West (also not – yet – a BCS conference, but better) .PSU is currently in the FCS and aspires to move to the FBS, which would certainly be a step up. WAC membership would certainly trump Big Sky membership, for sure.
It’s a little sad when the Oregonian daily pay newspaper attempts to outsnark the Mercury and fails. But many people channel personal news seeking through a humor lens, like watchers of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert. But we prefer successful snark, not fail.
Canzano drops the usual Portland Tea Party rants: city council, Sam Adams, the tram, bike lanes, the bike plan, mass transit, urban renewal, sentimental architects, the Blazers and driving small business out of town.
Portland is an individual sports town, with thousands, even tens, flocking to road races. We have kayakers, dragon boat racers, indoor soccer players, bike racers (and Zoobombers), champion snowboarders.
Portland is not a team sports town, even including the suburbs. They barely support the Blazers and do not support the Beavers enough to make it a viable business. Our Portland sports industry knows that, and caters to the individual sportsman/woman. If the Oregonian were smart, they would make individuals in sports the story, not Tea Party baseball rants.
Wealthy individuals hijack the personal achievement drive for spectator sports business aims. My home town has spent over a billion it didn’t have to build professional sports facilities downtown. But the downtown is still dead. The days of government supported stadiums are gone. Think Rome. It can’t be done in Portland, now or in the future.
If you are a rabid baseball fan, you can easily ride the train, mass transit, to Seattle. Or maybe Beaverton will be home to the Beavers, in a ballpark on the light rail. Oops, government mass transit projects that unite Portland business interests to Seattle and Beaverton-Hillsboro!
@TSW
Okay, I’ll play. in the 2009 season there were only 2 profitable MLS teams (according to a hastily read wikipedia article). And even with rising attendance MLS doesn’t match MLB and it’s years of average attendance.
I’m not saying baseball is perfect. Any sports franchise is going to have its troubles. And I wasn’t trying to paint a rosy picture. I was just trying to make the point that saying baseball is a dying sport is a ludicrous statement–which it is.
The point of my comments were to simply say, we don’t need to abandon one sport for another. It doesn’t make sense. And the anger that fans of each sport are directing toward one another is just plain stupid.
And if I’m making the trip to Salem for Triple A, I might as well put in a couple extra hours to go to Seattle where the fans are only slightly better than comatose but the game still has a bit of spectacle.
@PAC
If there was any soccer fan vs. baseball fan crap started it was from the Beavers fans. Back when the MLS deal was coupled to the Beavers getting a new stadium we soccer fans were huge advocates, admittedly selfishly, for a new Beavers stadium at the MC site and then at Lents. It’s the baseball fans that have sometimes blamed the soccer fans for the Beavers leaving town, we just defend ourselves.
Of course when the MLS deal was officially decoupled from the Beavers stadium we were going to focus on MLS. That’s what we were in it for but we advocated for the Beavers even more than Beavers fans did before that decoupling, so excuse us if we get a little defensive when accused of helping send the Beavers packing. We were out their (again, selfishly) more than the Beavers fans you really only hear about on the Internet and never see in person.
PAC: “In the 2009 season there were only 2 profitable MLS teams (according to a hastily read wikipedia article). And even with rising attendance MLS doesn’t match MLB and it’s years of average attendance”
The Beavers are in MLB now? Compare AAA baseball numbers to MLS numbers, and then get back to us.
Oh, but that’s right, you’re not trying to make an either/or comparison. You want both. I do, too. Having both, however, means a renovated PGE Park for MLS and a new AAA ballpark (Coliseum, Lents, Beaverton, Vancouver, take your pick… the owner tried them all) for the Beavers. The days of a dual-use PGE Park for both were obviously over, as anyone who attended the meetings and followed the process knew. If things had stayed as is at PGE Park, both teams were gone.
I don’t think anyone necessarily “abandoned” baseball, I just think Adams has lost all power, influence, and credibility, and was too quick and easy to push over instead of actually getting something done for the Beavers.
PAC,
I agree-there’s no point pitting one sport against another. But MLS is growing. Sure, it has a fraction of the years of service than does the MLB, but like all professional leagues, you can’t speak of them in generalities (except perhaps the NFL, where across the board teams do better, on average). Here’s where MLB works-New York, Boston, Philly, St. Louis, Chicago (only The Cubs), For the most part-San Francisco, the Dodgers. At times Milwaukee, Minnesota. The rest are failing in a business sense. When the Tampa Rays went the world series a few years ago they could barely fill their stadium before they hit the playoffs. The Braves annually undersell for playoff games. Having your best teams (who aren’t Boston/NY/Philly) be financially miserable is not healthy.
It’s really a case of locational success. Sure, the MLS struggles, but soccer in Portland seems to be working (Check the attendance for a USL d-2 team). Baseball doesn’t (check the attendance for a PCL team). I don’t think baseball in the northwest will ever work. Not that I don’t want it to. I was in Seattle when the Kingdome went Kablooey and seeing those juiced-up freaks win 116 games at that nice, new stadium was pretty cool. Then those artifically enanced bodies fell apart, the Mariners began to suck, attendance fell (oh, but ticket prices stayed the same or went up), and no good players wanted to come play in this weather, in front of lukewarm, “slightly better than comatose fans.”
Going to Brewers games at County Stadium was a blast as a kid so I’m not opposed to the game in general. You can romanticize it all you want, but there are just no signs it can work here on a big scale.
Personally, I’m a hockey guy, and above all else, I’d love to have an NHL team. There’s no reason it couldn’t eventually work here like the Blazers work. It’s the best live sport, hands down, and can appeal to the non-traditional sports fan much like the Blazers do.
Gordo is right and I apologize for misspeaking. I meant to say a Division I school and not to imply that PSU could obtain any of the BCS automatic qualifiers.
A well reasoned, researched post just got obliterated because I’m a moron. So here’s the Reader’s Digest version.
In 2002, 21/30 MLB teams claimed operating losses.
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/200…
Forbes says the difference between claimed losses and actual profits averages +$10,000,000 per team. Why? Because sports owners don’t like paying taxes on revenues. MLS owners are the same. No one with a straight face claims that MLB is about to go bankrupt because teams claim they’re not profitable (while their valuations skyrocket). It’s the reddest of herrings. In no other league is team success or stability marked by operating costs as long as franchise valuation is stable or rising. MLS owners are willing to take that hit to their properties because it’s still fiscally prudent to do so.
It seems to me that throughout this entire process, up to and including this comment thread, people are pissed for one reason or another and looking for someone to blame.
Baseball fans are pissed at Paulson, City Hall, the Timbers, the sport of soccer, hipster-faux-euro-blah-blah-blah and so on.
It just seems to not make a lick’s worth of difference who’s to blame. I went to the Beavers game on Sunday (to say my goodbyes), I’ll attend the Timbers season next summer, and I already have tickets to some Winterhawks games in between.
Ideally, I think the best option now is for a city like Hillsboro to bring in a Single A team.
I wish I could continue to see baseball in Portland, too, but I wouldn’t trade it for the route to work on my bike that doesn’t result in my death (and even then I have to go a few miles out of my way just to avoid the Ross Island Bridge). Bike lanes make a city better, just like a vibrant and successful sports team. The Beavers have not been that in years, and as much as I still enjoy going to a baseball game here and there, it isn’t worth the $7 domestics and certainly not worth passing up an opportunity for a sports team that people will actually go out and watch.
All the people raising Cain over this need to think back and start every conversation on the topic with, “I have been to ____ Beavers games in the last five years.”
Canzano is comparing apples to hubcaps. I can’t help but question the values of someone who obsessively watches sports but probably couldn’t get their fat ass of the couch and onto a bike. Portland’s bike infrastructure is something to be proud of and has long term beneficial potential for the city as a whole.
I generally couldn’t care less about sports but it seems more than a little ironic that an “activity” like watching organized sports -which ideally should be a celebration of health and vitality generally consists of sitting on one’s ass eating the worst food in the world while guzzling soft drinks and beer.
People people people! such anger and hostility! Canzano is correct in asserting that we lost an opportunity when we let the Beavers go. I also think he is correct when he assigns responsibility for this to our elected city leaders. Sam wilted under a little heat, and for what?. How many Portlanders actually go to the memorial part of memorial coliseum and pay homage to our vets? How many Portlanders go to the coliseum and stare in awe at its architectural marvels – it’s a flippin glass box! Big picture, we should be able to enjoy baseball and soccer – both are great sports! Canzano is simply drawing attention to the notion that we are a top 25 US city and we let an established franchise slip away. That’s too bad.
I don’t understand how a claim of Sam wilting under heat can be made when it was never established that he would be adequately representing his constituency by keeping the Beavers in town. There was no group I’m aware of who championed the concept of a Memorial Field to give Sam the ability to show that the plan had popular support. The good people of Lents seethed about the idea of a field at Lents Park without rebuttal from baseball fans.
The difference between a leader standing up under pressure or ramming an unwanted “boondoggle” down the throat of an unwilling public is almost solely down to whether or not you personally agree with the proposal. Even now, I don’t think it’s possible to say whether letting the Beavers go served the public interest because to a very large extent the general public (or any representative part therein) never cared enough to make their feelings known.
Ask any 10 Portlanders what they thought of the Beavers and you’d probably get 2 people who talked exclusively about MLB, 2 people who professed love but then confessed that they went to maybe 1 or 2 games per season, and 6 people who shrugged their shoulders and walked away. More than any financial constraint, more than any single politician, public apathy did in the Portland Beavers.
If you love baseball, then you love baseball. Go support your local college team. (Or little league team for that matter… it’s usually more exciting.)
There was a great moment there in KGW’s coverage of the whole thing yesterday where some baseball fan is talking about how “the majority of Portlanders are out of touch with the people,” on the subject.
The majority is out of touch with the majority. Gotcha.
@ RB: LMAO! Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded…
@extramsg The bike plan (which calls for a bunch of separated bikeways, etc., not just bike lanes) is $613 million over 20 years, or 31 million a year. That’d be about 9 percent of the metro area’s annual transportation spending of $630 million or so.
All very rough numbers.
@R
“They barely support the Blazers…enough to make it a viable business”
As a lifelong Blazer maniac, that’s just fucking insulting. Where the hell have you been the last three seasons, there, Hippy McBurkenstocks? The Rose Garden has sold out 100 consecutive games last season and our city has some of the highest TV ratings in the NBA! Some sports columnists have no business commenting on city infrastructure but a lot of white liberals have no business commenting on professional competitive sports!
“I’m sad that baseball is leaving PDX. I’m even more sad that for some reason footballers and baseball fans have to be such dicks to one another. Love your sport. Go ahead. But you don’t have to tear someone else’s down.”
No shit, right? I’m a Mariner fan/Mets in the NL, and a Timbers supporter. I know for a fact that a lot of cats in the TA are MLB fans as well. If Cricket can survive centuries alongside footy across the pond, I think Baseball can eventually make a comeback here in Portland.
“I’d love to have an NHL team. There’s no reason it couldn’t eventually work here like the Blazers work.”
FUCK YEAH!
http://cdn.nhl.com/kings/images/upload/200…
BUCKAROOS TO NHL!