I went to the game Sunday afternoon thinking it would be packed. Gorgeous day and a pretty good game. Cheap entertainment. Apparently Portlanders have better things to do, and that is a good thing.

Keep in mind that Opening Night was four whole days ago.

Or maybe everyone went to get a drink or take a leak at the same moment.

You would think that more people would start to become skeptical. Was any historical data used to make these claims of future attendance?
Also, if this insane fraud does get to the point where we remodel PGE Park again, has anyone looked at the $$ bid/plans line by line? (better question: is there anything on paper?) I am at a loss as to what could possibly cost all those millions just to convert it for soccer. Oh yeah, you have to remember that all those payoffs are padded into there....

Come on Jack . . .

To be fair, that game was on a Monday night. In the new stadium deal, Sam Adumbs, Randy, and Merrit Paulson will ban Mondays.

The problem is that it's minor league baseball, and there's other stuff to do in town. Look at any city with hugely popular minor league ball, and it's either a one stoplight kind of place (an example would be the Padres' single A affiliate in High Desert, CA), or a long/quirky team history. (Example: Durham Bulls, St. Paul Saints.) Portland is/has neither. People tend not to support minor league baseball because the quality of play isn't all that awesome, and with the players in a constant state of flux, you can't ever really build a team identity. All your best players disappear after one season, frequently less.

Isn't the argument that the stadium is too big, which is why people don't show up for games? Yeah, that's the ticket!

Wait a minute. That picture was taken from the Multnomah Club. How many other swells were there, watching the game for nothing?

"In the new stadium deal, Sam Adumbs, Randy, and Merrit Paulson will ban Mondays."

Nah, they'll gin up a special subsidy to purchase unused tickets funded by an ultra-secret new URD.

It would be nice if we could convince them to hold off on stadia-building until the teams had a year or two to prove themselves.

Maybe it's a silent boycott by people who don't want to subsidize the Paulsons.

I'm with you except for the condo tower. As I understand it, only 19 of the 250-some units in that building are still on the market. That it's actually a successful enterprise is yet another reason why a URA in the area makes no sense.

I my guess on the turnout would be a MAX of 500, unless of course there were 1,400 visiting the bathrooms when picture was taken. I question the attendance numbers as I question ALL the other numbers being used in the city's/Paulson's projections. There were maybe 20 people on the MAC balcony.

Haven't encountered "swells" used in a sentence since the movie IRONWEED.

Portland has the highest prices for minor league season tickets in the country. I used to go to Beavers games in the past but I can't afford it anymore.

Ben Waterhouse is right. The Civic was a very successful deal for Gerding/Edlen. It also included some low income housing in the low-rise next door. Not everything that has been done lately was an overpriced boondoggle.

We were at the Seattle Mariners game on sunday at Safeco Field; and they only had about 30,000 for the first sunday home game of the season. If the MLB clubs are having lower than anticipated attendance; you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that minor league teams will do even worse. And the Safeco team store had a lot less traffic than in past seasons as well.

And the Safeco team store had a lot less traffic than in past seasons as well.

I was in the Safeco team store inside the stadium Sunday before the game. If that's what less traffic looks like, I would hate to have been in there when it was packed. There were people and lines everywhere in there. It was insanity. I simply wanted a hat. Had I stuck around, I would have been in there for well over an hour.

Chris,

That crowding in the stadium and team stores is called a sports franchise that pays for itself and supports the local government through sales tax receipts and employment.

It is something that a fan of MLS in Portland will never experience at MLS games.

In the "sickly power point presentation" given to the aplomb citizen advisory committee, Portland's Triple AAA attendance ranked in the bottom third of all 30 teams.

But what is more astonishing is that Portland has twice the population of the population average of all the other AAA cities.

But I'm still confident that Paulson's average attendance projections of 18,500 will come true, even though it is three times the present attendance. With this projection the sickly results says that maybe the debt might be paid off.

Chris: We got to the stadium early - around 11:15 A.M. Maybe about 50 people in the store at the time. I suspect it might have been more crowded later on - but as season ticket holders for the past four years, it sure looked less busy than in past years. And our section in the Terrace Club was at best half filled for the game on sunday.