Portland - The City That Works Except for Sports

I'm actually saddened by the prospect of baseball leaving the Rose City, even with the most recent efforts to try and save the Portland Beavers coming forth. The city commissioners, or specifically one of them, is still trying to put out one last ditch effort to save the team for the city while current ownership is resigned to the fact that if they can't make it work here, it's time to sell the club and move them to an area that can support them. The original idea for baseball was to tear down the Memorial Coliseum, a long standing landmark in the area and put a redesigned ballpark on the site with a redesigned veterans memorial.

 

Critics of the plan not only got the MC baseball idea stalled, but ended up getting the building a historic designation making any changes to the property now more difficult. And while Portland had gone through an evaluation period of other ideas for the MC, we still sit here over a year later from when the process started, and nothing has been officially decided. The Coliseum still stands, but nobody seems to know what for or in what state the building will be kept in, PGE Park moves towards its future as a soccer/football only facility, and baseball moves out of the area.

 

And now, the hockey team that is using the MC most often for their games has weighed in to say they want a decision made or they will leave the area. It's bad enough that this process has been completely run into the ground, but when one of the main tenants is frustrated enough to pull up stakes, you know something isn't right here.  But I can understand their frustration because the process itself has been clumsy, misguided and plain inept.

 

I get the MC has some great memories associated with it, and it's still being used for events right now, as Arcade Fire will visit the old barn this fall. But it's apparent the facility hasn't been kept up, and now it appears there will need to be a serious investment just to get the building to a level to host events without having everything fall apart. So the question really is what does the city gain by investing in the future of an arena that may have a future but also stands to lose their main tenant if they don't do anything?

 

What convolutes the whole process is the various groups providing input here. The Trail Blazers own the Rose Garden and run the MC, and would prefer to keep events going to the RG because they get more revenue. And if any renovation happens on the MC, they have first refusal rights to either buy into the plan or put their input into the process, so basically anything that changes at the MC must be approved by them. The architectural community view the MC as a landmark, so they would prefer to keep things as they are. The sports community wants a functioning building, which right now would require investment that the city doesn't have funds for and private parties have been unwilling to make into a city facility without some plans or concessions. The Beavers tried and failed, and it appears the hockey team is now being asked to put up or shut up.

 

For me, the issue is really simple. If we keep the MC as what it is now, a midrange sized arena, spend the money and fix it up so the hockey team has a home. If we want to repurpose it, make it useful for the most possible groups and not just a marketing ploy or some other cheesy area gone bad. If we tear it down, use the area for baseball. But decide on something, because the perpetual back and forth is just getting too old, and now the city stands to lose more than just a baseball team.

 

Portland has already been shown to be progressive in so many ways, but they lack fortitude and resolve to fund projects that benefit the greater whole of the city. Facilities that are built owned by the city but run for use of sports and events are a great way to create jobs, attract business and travel, and help the city as a whole, but our town hasn't invested money in any stadium renovation since the MC was first built. PGE Park will have been fixed over twice using bonds backed by city funds, but it's been private money that has funded those changes. Sports is good for the area as a whole, but I understand that in the business climate, it's tough to ask people to pay more for something that a small portion of people use and enjoy. But having facilities like this do so much more than just host sports, and I'm hoping the city can see the wonderful opportunity they have in making the MC viable again by either fixing it up or tearing it down to serve another purpose.

 

 

Severe case of writer's block - party of one

You've probably noticed if you read this column regularly that entries have become a bit sporadic. I wished I had a better answer that just things getting in the way, but honestly, it's hard to keep track of everything going on in life at points, and because of that writing time gets cut. Granted, my other blog has a pretty easy schedule, because I write when news of the Timbers happens and I can get something out pretty easily. The subjects and timeframe are pretty much taken care of, so it's just simply writing something interesting in 800 words or less.

 

This blog is a bit more freeform in that I try to write when I have interesting or frustrating things to talk about, and I want to vent or share. But at the same time, I don't want this to become a point of pure bitching and whining, because that simply accomplishes nothing. There are far more interesting places for whining to go than here, like Blazers message boards or Big Soccer if you really want to hear folks drone on about things.

 

At the same point, the summer is a difficult time to write about subjects. I could write about sports, but right now, all everyone in that world wants to talk about is LeBron or Tiger, and I couldn't care less to waste any more space talking about them than I just did. Most professional athletes have the entirely wrong idea about what it is to be famous, and simply flaunt the god given talents and massive amounts of money they get to play sports in a narcissistic desire to be better than everyone else. I find most NBA players completely out of touch with reality because they can't understand what the rest of us have to do just simply to afford tickets to a game.

 

There are notable exceptions to the rule, and many of them reside here in the Rose City. But the message of their exploits around here gets buried in a complete drivel of drama surrounding the management and ownership of the team. The current owner can't seem to get out of his own way at points of making personnel decisions, but at the same time, he's the guy writing the checks so he can pretty much do what he wants. He knows that the team absolutely owns the fans in this town and dominates the media outlets, so they can do just about anything and this town will adore them. Think I'm kidding about that, but the team was still remotely successfully during their dark ages of player stupidity and people were still going to games even though the "economic model was broken"  And now that things are better, the fans can spend hours and hours talking about the most inane details of free agency, trade deals until they've beaten the subject senseless.

 

Sounds like I'm being rather cynical here, and you are absolutely right. I can't stand media types that bash on certain sports incessantly because they can't be bothered to get it, yet can suck up to a certain sport and talk about it for hours and hours ad naseum. My biggest complaint about the Trail Blazers right now is simply that I have other sports that are more interesting to me right now, and I'm not being allowed to get away from them long enough to miss them and regain that spark of interest. Maybe others care so much about the roster and deals, and want to talk about it all the time, but frankly, I would rather deal with other things.

 

Yet the sport I love, soccer, is derided by the same outlets as boring, European, sissy, and a whole list of detractions all the time. Look, I absolutely despise NASCAR because I can't think of anything as boring as watching cars go around in circles for hours, and if I really wanted to watch it, I'd go play in traffic on the Banfield. But I respect that it's a popular activity that people love and there's a competitive and athletic element to it. But I don't go around and trash it because I know there are fans. Yet there seems to be little to no respect for soccer because it's cool to bash it.

 

Never mind that millions of people watch the sport regularly, including the most recent World Cup. Never mind that players often play non stop for years between national and club duty, risking injuries and fitness. Try and throw a ball to a point on a field and see if you can hit it with precision, and now take that same ball and kick it with the same results, and you'll see the game has a skill that isn't completely understood. Most soccer offenses follow the same principles of a triangle offense or pick and roll in basketball, but yet one sport is loved here yet another despised.

 

I get that the scoring is down and there's a bit too much overacting on certain calls. When you have a single official making all the calls on the pitch, sometimes players embellish on things that they shouldn't. Yet, one sport sees flopping as a viable option, while fans chastise in another. A 1 to 0 baseball game is considered a gem, or a no hitter is a masterpiece, but a 1 to 0 soccer game is pure boredom. I know that a lot of the haters have never played the game, so that leads to much misconceptions and ideas about how boring things are, but I think the reason why soccer isn't as well liked is pretty obvious.

 

We hate the fact that America is in the middle of the table when it comes to soccer, and if we can't dominate it, there's no point in being interested. We rule the world in baseball and basketball, yet soccer we're within the top 30 teams playing in the world. But if we dominated and won most every tournament, I can bet that many fans would pick up the game because we were good at it. Mind you, there is over 200 nations in FIFA playing for 32 berths in the World Cup, so qualifying for the tournament is a big deal simply by the numbers. The United States is extremely competitive in its region, and is taking big steps to keep its profile up. But with nations that live and breathe soccer and produce hundreds of talented athletes, the U.S. is going to have issues at points keeping their most talented soccer athletes playing the game with other choices going on.

 

We can help our cause by keeping MLS vibrant and strong, and continuing to support youth and developmental soccer in all avenues, but also trying to remain diligent in dealing with the haters. The game is simple, beautiful, and complex all in the same package, and if you give it a chance, you might find that it's not such a bad game at all.

I'm just tired of all the talk

Today, I was walking with some friends as they got some coffee at a local coffee house, and I was asked what I thought about NBA free agency. My exact words were, "I could care less right now because right now, my focus is on other things. I'm tired of sports seasons dragging on so long that it's hard to concentrate on a particular sport."

 

When I was younger, the sports seasons had an exact offseason. The NFL got done after the Super Bowl in January, allowing spring training to get some attention while the NBA was building up its playoff run. The NBA playoffs got out of the way before the pennant races started heating up in baseball before football started getting going in the late part of the summer. While there was big news about sports at various points, there was enough of a down time where casual fans could move from sport to sport rather easily.

 

Now, baseball playoffs run into November which bleeds into free agency, while the NBA puts its draft and free agency smack in the middle of summer, drawing basketball fans into long drawn out discussions about salary caps and signings. The NFL draft has become a 4 day affair, drawing out the spectacle of players being picked by teams, while there is actual coverage of workouts and camps that football fans can watch. Mind you, if you are a passionate sports fan of one of the sports, you are in heaven because it's all attention all the time. But for someone like myself that used to be able to keep up with things relatively easily, I find it harder and harder to do.

 

Soccer has become a passion, more now that I write about it on a regular basis in my other world, but it's the ultimate fan experience. I can watch a match in 2 hours or less, and it's done for the weekend. Just one match, one meeting, it's simple. Granted, there is a lot of offseason movement, but at the same point, FIFA mandates that players can only belong to one club at a time, so player movement is restricted in that respect. You also have various transfer window times that player movement is done in, making it easier to keep track of things.

 

Maybe it's just informational overload, because right now, I can't spend days worrying about whether the Trail Blazers will sign who they want or where the big NBA free agents will end up. I frankly don't care right now, because it's pure speculation, and the only people that aren't talking about it are the players. If you want to drum up interest, that's a sure way to pull in the rabid basketball fans, but at the same point, it's not nearly as interesting or compelling. Even if Portland was a key player in free agency, I don't think that would make me any more interested, because it's all about money and power.

 

I need a break from time to time from my teams, and the way the schedules work themselves out makes it easier for me to keep my sanity. When the Timbers are completing their season, the Trail Blazers are in full swing and so I can turn my attention there easily, while filling in for the occassional Broncos game. With other interests competing for time, I just don't have the disposable time to just sit back and watch hours and hours of sports anymore, so I have to choose my time wisely. The fact that my wife also enjoys soccer means that I can watch games with her, and not only fulfill a sports fix but spend time with the one I love.

 

But maybe, just maybe it's about me growing up a bit and realizing that while sports is an amazing thing, it can't just be everything in a person's life. Passion is great, but even the most crazed fan needs some time off from time to time. I just wished that the talking heads at sports radio followed that line of thinking, instead of the blathering on of "What will the Blazers do now?"  Right now, I've got more important things to think about than that.

Dear God, the promotions people must be hard up for ideas....

I live with a pack of cats, well, I suppose the best thing I can say is that they tolerate my existance because of the food and attention that they get from me and my wife on a daily basis. and they do a great job of putting my mind at ease at certain points because of their unconditional love and support. Granted, I could do without some of the butt sniffing and other odd grooming things cats do, but that pales in comparison with what other benefits they provide.

And the Internet has put cats up on a pedestal of sorts with the invention of LOLcats. These cute pictures started appearing on the Internet 7 years ago in random places where cats are doing something cute or disturbing and it's captioned in mangled cat talk to say what they might be thinking. The most famous one is Happy Cat, who is smiling and making the eternal statement that all cats make: "I can haz cheezburger?" The fun article site, Fark.com, has a dedicated day on Saturdays for LOLcat pictures, and I can even say that a few of our cats have ended up in the grandure of LOLcats because of their antics. I won't even speak to what our cat Pilot did to a stuffed Domo-Kun when we weren't looking.

So I'm reading the sports headlines this morning, and found out that last night in the land up north, they had LOLcat day at the ball park, complete with a Happy Cat bobblehead, a special singing of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in lolcat, and other assorted celebrations of the Internet phenomenon. Apparently, they had more prizes than tickets sold, but it was a decent sized crowd for a weeknight. I have to admit that promotions is often a thankless business, because while you work hard to fill seats with fans, if the prize is too special or in demand, you end up with customers who could care less about the sporting event and are just there for the trinket. This phenomenon often upsets the most hardcore sports fans, who have to put up with the fair-weather prize grubbing fan. The Timbers had a skate deck night this year that turned out a huge crowd, but admittedly, there was a section of the crowd that probably couldn't have told you what event was really going on that night, they just got a cool skate deck for free.

I guesss I'm just a little frustrated that corporate sporting America has taken a relatively cool phenomenon like LOLcats and turned them into a marketing ploy to sell baseball tickets. While I admit that I shouldn't be surprised because everything in our current world has a price tag associated with it, I had hoped that some fads would be just left alone and allowed to attain super status rather than jump the shark in some spectacularly inane way. I guess at least this promotion is slightly better than Roni Deutch Does Your Taxes night!

Baseball's Really Rough Day

Baseball might still be considered America's pastime, but it sure took a beating yesterday in the press. There's something nostalgic about forgetting about the world passing by when you sit in a ballpark, and time is essentially rendered mute because baseball will in most cases have 9 innings and 27 outs for at least one side. There's obvious exceptions, but baseball has essentially remained unchanged in its rules of play for decades.

 

And when you have armies of sports writers that wax on about the glory days of the game during simpler times and when players weren't known as much for the sometimes idiotic things they did off the field, for some, it triggers a flood of memories. Baseball is historic, and while it has some wonderful aspects to the simplicity of the game, the fan experience for me is really not what it once was.

 

Going to watch baseball used to be a special treat, on the rare occasion that I could find time to watch a game and just take a few hours off from the world. Now, games are all over television, and it's almost become a better situation to watch the games at home. Fans adopt teams from cross country just because they want to, rather than actually following their local team or a player that they've admired for years that plays on a team. Players change teams to the point where sometimes they can't be identified as being part of a city, where in baseball's history, players became part of a team fabric and often times, never played elsewhere.

 

With the advent of all of this, it's hard for me to sit down and actually be patient enough to sit through all the interruptions. Teams now take time outs as much as they can, introductions take a while, and baseball has now become a game that takes over 3 hours to play simply because of so much idle time. And as much as some fans want the game to speed up, many others prefer to leave it as it is. And that's probably the biggest crux of baseball's problem right now - how to update the game without completely alienating the game's history.

 

Baseball fans cling to history probably more that any fan group I've ever been around, because statistics and history are paramount to understanding baseball on a more integral level. A love of numbers and strategy led to the advent of fantasy baseball, as fans thought they could build a team better than paid professionals. And baseball fans argue history more than anyone because the measuring stick of the Hall of Fame or great players is all based upon stats and their playing history. When you cling to history, though, there is the risk that you cling to what you know and changes aren't as accepted because it's all about preserving the game.

 

Baseball hasn't adopted any technology that could help speed up games or assist in making calls recently with one notable exception - allowing instant replay to determine if a ball is a home run or not. So they still rely upon the eyes and ears of umpires to make most calls. They flirted a bit with an computerized system that would help determine strike zone, but have phased that out in most cases to keep the human element. Yet, most television broadcasts have added computerized graphics and slow motion cameras to allow viewers to see whether pitches are strikes or balls and whether close plays are valid or not. While this is good for the viewer at home, it reinforces problems when umpires get the call wrong.

 

Nothing reinforces that better than last night in Detroit when the final out of the game there was slightly delayed when an umpire missed a relatively easy call at first base on an easy grounder. Normally, this wouldn't be news, but in this case, the pitcher from Detroit had thrown a perfect game not allowing a hit or walk up to that point. And if the call had gone correctly, we would have witnessed the 22nd perfect game in baseball history. Instead, the game ends officially as a one hitter, the umpire ends up endlessly apologizing for a blown call, and fans all over are grousing about how a call like that could have been missed. Even MLB is now reviewing the situation to see if they might step in and fix the result allowing the perfect game to stand.

 

The idea of that sets a rather bad precedent of going back to fix things that there should be a system to allow in the first place. Instead of shunning technology, MLB should have allowed instant replay to help make calls in cases like this, but instead, it found protecting history and the integrity of the game more important. And now if you make this change without really addressing the full issue at hand, what happens if a championship game is decided on a close call that ends up being blown? Instead of enacting solid change and embracing ways to update the game while keeping the essential spirit of the game going, baseball has put its head in the sand and now is paying the price. Which frustrates more and more fans every day, and instead of sticking with the game, they've chosen to move to other pursuits.

 

For me, I prefer soccer because of its compartmentalized time clock and relative simplicity of the game on the surface yet complexity abounds. Yes, the game isn't without its own brand of controversy, but at the same point, teams and leagues are starting to embrace change and making sure that calls go correctly. While I admire MLB for trying to tackle this issue, unless they completely look at enhancing instant replay, changing the call from last night does nothing more that open the door for more problems. It might correct an injustice from a horrible call and give a pitcher the nod in history that he deserves, but it undermines the very integrity of the game to just change it without addressing the underlying causes. Mind you, baseball already has issues in this area from years of steroid problems and other cheating incidents, and they've barely scratched the surface of the issues behind those situations, so what would I expect here?

 

Baseball will fix the immediate problem and move on to the next thing, and fall closer and closer to a game that is losing fans and interest simply because of their own desire to keep things status quo. It's not that I don't appreciate history, but at the same time, there are ways to update the game without disturbing the legacy, but it appears the ownership and management of MLB are more interested in counting money and television ratings that truly address the problems going on right now.