Empty suits pack Marlins game

My guess is that announced attendance is season tickets plus walkup. I don't know what the total number of season tickets sold by the Marlins this year is. But judging from the picture, it would appear to be just south of 10K. But the team still has the money from all the season ticket holders that didn't show up.

Of course since they didn't show up, they didn't buy beer, or pay to park...

 

Tampa and Miami both need retractable-roof stadiums. Out of 81 home dates, the weather is fine for 40 of them, but either hot as hell, or threatening to rain, for the other 41.

They need retractable-roof stadiums, and they need to pay for them themselves. MLB franchises are multi-hundred-million-dollar operations, let them pony up the financing and get it done.

 

Of that 10,000 they actually announced how many of them were cockroaches?

 

And, in light of that recent story about rats at Angels Stadium, can you imagine how CLEAN this stadium is?

 

That's quality work.

 

Portland always comes up as a destination for a MLB team and it always cracks me up.

Portland has a very old, small wooden ballpark in the middle of a mixed retail/residential area. There is no parking there. Last I saw the "plans" to bring in a team -- and admittedly, it was a few years ago -- those plans involved minor renovation and expansion of the existing park. In the end, you would have Wrigley Field... minus the charm, the tradition, the ivy, the fan support, and the Cubs. Yippee.

And it's worth noting -- Portland is not a sports town. It developed a nice reputation by selling out the Blazer games for years. Then the team left the second smallest building in the NBA... and no more sellouts. And if you subtracted the corporately-owned season tickets you were left with very few actual ticket buyers, even in the peak of their popularity.

Seriously, I'd be stunned if a team survived in Portland for more than three years.

 

Salt Lake City might be a better MLB town than Portland -- and I don't think it's a viable option.

But the stadium would be easily (if that's possible) bumped up to 40,000+ seats and parking isn't too big an issue with a few blocks full of vacant warehouses nearby and lite-rail train dropping off people from across the valley just a block away.

Seriously, if the Marlins and/or DRays were to be moved, I'd rather see them contracted.

 

And they have soccer matches there in the summer as well (Portland Timbers, USL-1).

But if I remember correctly, PGE Park, the Timbers and the Beavers (I think that's the name of the minor league team) are all own by the same organization.
So if Portland got an MLB club I think it would be rather difficult for them to use PGE for at least a season or two.

 

Maybe they are going by the Browns' philosophy in recent years of announcing "tickets distributed." Not paid attendance or actual attendance.

"Tickets distributed."

In other words, a number that has pretty much no correlation to the actual number of people attending the game (and if you've been to a Browns game in December, you damn well there aren't 72,000+ there like they'd lead you to believe).

 

PGE Park is not made of wood, except for the roof. It would be a stopgap for two years at best.

There is land on the east side of the river, near the Rose Garden, that is all ready to go. The state legislature even passed a stadium bill several years ago to help with financing (it raises tax money via the employees of the club and tickets sold, not through a general assessment.) The governor is a huge baseball fan. The mayor of Portland is retiring, and will be replaced by someone more business-friendly who will be an advocate for the RESPONSIBLE addition of MLB, not an opponent.

The Blazers regularly sold out the Rose Garden before they got horrible and became social malcontents. Attendance rose significantly last year, and will rise again this year, even without Oden.

Portland's metro population is 2,516,971, (latest count) and it's projected to grow by at least 20-30 percent by 2030. It's already the 23rd-largest market in the USA, and the way the area/West Coast in general is growing, it will be a top-20 market before too long. Washington/Clackamas counties, and Clark County across the river in Washington, are booming.

Beavers/Timbers ownership is no problem. If the Marlins come, they simply buy the guy's territorial rights. But the smart money says the guy who owns the B/T (Merritt Paulson, son of the Treasury Secretary, a former Wall Street guy) has more than enough financial connections to possibly line up enough investors to buy a team himself (Phil Knight isn't interested).

The same people who say Portland is a bad sports town are the same people who said baseball would never work in Seattle, or that Oregon was too small for two D-1 football teams. Well, the Mariners have regularly drawn more than 2.5 million since SafeCo opened, and Oregon and Oregon State will combine to draw nearly 100,000 fans this Saturday for two games 40 miles apart. The Mariners' TV ratings in Portland are very solid.

Someday, someone will move an MLB team to Portland. And they will do well, with very, very few rainouts. I can guarantee you they'd draw more than 400 fans on a sunny Monday afternoon in September.

 

I'd wonder about Oklahoma City as well. They seemed to be in a hurry to embrace the Hornets when they played there after Katrina; I don't know what their attendance is like in Triple-A, but a ballpark near downtown would be very nice.

The one drawback; Oklahoma summers being a lot like Florida in terms of humidity. Still, might be worth a shot.

 

The current minor league park is right downtown and it's very nice. It's right in the middle of Bricktown and has a Camden Yards feel to it.

However, I don't know if there is enough room to expand it to the size necessary for an MLB team.

The old minor league park was out by the fairgrounds and was an absolute launching pad for hitters.