My great-uncle Ken Williams was perhaps the greatest baseballer ever come out of Oregon.
Consequently, I've followed ball in this town a bit. Yeah, it used to be quite a town for the game.

He came out of Grants Pass and every mill town used to field a team. Heck every town of any size had a team. My great-grandfather's diaries (horse accounts) chronicle just how popular it was for Oregon back in the day and how big a deal it was to play for Portland, even after having left the big leagues.

Think of the urban blight and political corruption of Detroit, without the new Comerica Park baseball stadium. Portland, a town that had a rich history of baseball.

This is the new Portland thanks to.... Randy "I have all your cash and there's nothing you can do about it" Leonard.

I myself wondered about a dissonant thing: a few years ago, when the Expos were going to leave Montreal, there was a pretty big, passionate campaign about "Bring Major League Baseball to Portland"

Maybe I missed it, but I've seen effectively no grassroots cry (there may have been some, I don't know) about the Beavers leaving town, and I was wondering, does anyone else think about the impression that leaves on MLB as far as Portland being ready to get a franchise?

That is to say, the lack of visible reaction to the Beavers going away, I'm betting, has set back the cause of bringing a franchise to Portland by at least a generation, if not more ... if ever.

Just thinkin' out loud on that one there.

Portland is not a baseball town at all, much less a good one, and I mean that in the best way possible. Portlanders simply aren't that much into watching others do, we're more into doing. The Trail Blazers work because their season almost perfectly coincides with the rainy seasons, so it's not so painful to go inside.

Posted by Samuel John Klein | July 22, 2010 8:51 PM

It is interesting to see the contrast, but I don't think the two reactions are necessarily "dissonant". I grew up going to Twins games in the Twin Cities (good baseball towns if ever there were ones), and I have even on several occasions made the drive up to Seattle when the Twins have been in town. If Portland were to get a MLB team (if perhaps MLB was to veto the A's move to San Jose and they turned their eyes north instead), I would be going to games all the time. Heck, I would probably get season tickets.

But I think I've been to all of 1 Beavers game in the past 5 years. I just don't see the allure of minor league baseball. Not only is the quality of play lower, but as soon as one of the players starts playing well, they're just going to move up to the major leagues, especially in the Padres system (most years anyways). Say what you will about the quality of play in MLS, which obviously is not the highest in the world, at least you don't have players commonly leaving mid-season because they're performing well on the field. How can you get attached to a team that way? Not to mention that it costs as much to go to a Beavers game as a major league game. It's just not worth it.

So while I find it unfortunate that the Beavers are leaving town, I'm not particularly upset about it, because realistically I wasn't going to go to any of their games anyways. But it would be a very different story if we had a MLB team in town.

I do think it will probably reflect poorly on Portland in terms of getting a future MLB franchise. Personally though, I wonder if minor league attendance is necessarily a good indicator of how a major league team of the same sport would fare in a given city. I think a lot of places, including Portland, rally around their major league teams regardless of the sport they play. Would anyone have guessed that Oklahoma City would be a great basketball town before the Thunder moved there (or really before the Hornets played there post-Katrina)? Similarly, would as many Portlanders follow basketball if the Blazers weren't here (or weren't the only major league team in town)? I think a lot of people just want to see teams compete at the highest levels of a sport. So I hope that the Beaver's departure doesn't totally kill our chances at getting a MLB team down the road.