Local resistance to baseball opens door for Portland bid

District Mayor Anthony Williams, D.C. Councilman Jack Evans and Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, perhaps three of the area’s most embattled politicians, all received major boosts in their approval ratings last week.

After decades of the Washington area subjugating itself to baseball and its many whims and demands, both the District and Virginia at last showed some spine. The trio said there would be no further significant movements on a stadium site or financing without a firm commitment of a team from Major League Baseball.

“There is no purpose moving this ahead, raising taxes and so forth, and then have baseball say, ‘Never mind.’” Evans said.

The torrent of local anger, while certainly not obscuring the depth of the region’s hunger for baseball, has been nothing short of cathartic.

More than 2,700 miles west of Washington, however, the folks in Portland, Ore., reacted to it with emotions ranged from bemusement to unabashed glee. Looking for an advantage against the larger and richer Washington area, Portland baseball backers think they found it with the District’s newly stated demand for a conditional award of the MLB-owned Montreal Expos.

Oregon’s contribution toward a $350million stadium, due for a critical vote by the state senate sometime in July, includes key provisions that would not release the money without a team in hand. But that legislative safety net still does not match the vitriol seen hereabouts.

“Oregon, the backward state with [supposedly] no chance, has better brains and better process than the folks out east at this stage,” said Maury Brown, spokesman for the Oregon Stadium Campaign [OSC], on an Internet site devoted to Portland’s MLB bid. “Let’s remember that only when things went bad in terms of the [financing] numbers did Evans go, ‘That’s it.’ Don’t place the blame squarely on MLB’s shoulders. If [Washington] and Mayor Williams had their act together on the funding proposal they wouldn’t be in this position.”

David Kahn, OSC executive director and point man on the city’s baseball bid, takes a more diplomatic stance.

“I’ve never looked at this as a competition,” Kahn said. “It doesn’t really matter what they say. We need to push forward and complete our stadium financing. In that regard, we are really competing against ourselves.”

Kahn may actually believe this, and by all available accounts he has presented Portland’s case in such a way to MLB executives. Others in Portland, however, have missed few, if any, opportunities to position the city as the answer to the Peter Angelos issue that so long has clouded the prospect of Washington baseball.

Portland and Seattle, MLB’s nearest market to Portland, are 170 miles apart. If the Expos move to Portland, it’s logical to think baseball can avoid the market cannibalization issues Angelos and some other owners fear so much.

And it’s important not to forget that only one of the three candidates for the Expos is going to get the team, barring some bizarre scenario that turns Puerto Rico into a long-term answer for baseball. And that means not only putting a best position forward, but also looking better than the others. That’s why the OSC’s Web site features plenty of market data comparing itself to Washington — favorably of course — and why the Expos relocation race has been about little more than civic chest beating.

“We have said from the very beginning there is no better place to put a team than Washington, D.C.,” said Bobby Goldwater, executive director of the D.C. Sports & Entertainment Commission. “When this city truly gets behind something, big things get done.”

All of this begs the question: Is Portland a realistic answer for baseball?

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