No Bed of Roses
Portland, Oregon is the home of the Padres’ AAA Pacific Coast League franchise, the Portland Beavers.
A new stadium, PGE Park, was built in 2000 to bring the Beavers, which had been the Dukes club for nearly thirty years prior, from Albuquerque. The town had a previous Triple-A baseball club that had been relocated for its sub-standard facilities and low attendance.
PGE did not provide the lift in attendance for which the Beavers’ owners had hoped. In late 2004, the team, teetering on insolvency, was taken over by the Pacific Coast League. The league found a new ownership group. The city completed negotiations with the new owners for a lease on the park that runs through 2010.
Portland has a population of just 539,544 in the city proper, per the last US Census estimate in 2003. That’s the bulk of Multnomah County’s 672,161. Nearby Washington County has another 488,253. Bordering Hood River and Columbia counties have 67,000+ between them. The area scrapes together 1.23 million residents, a far cry from the roughly 5.4 million people in Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties from which the Marlins currently draw.
Sources tell MLN that the city is content with its current arrangements with the minor league club. The Marlins could wait out their current stadium lease in Miami until 2010 to move to Portland. To wait so long to move into what has been another anemic baseball market with a much smaller overall population seems unlikely.
Forget the Alamo
San Antonio has made some noise about becoming a major league market. They have the NBA Spurs franchise, after all, and an AHL (AAA) hockey club along with their class AA San Antonio Missions baseball team.
Hovering around 1.3 million people in Bexar County, 1.1 million of them in San Antonio proper, the area is still a big drop in both average income and population from South Florida. While the smaller quarters of basketball have drawn well, no one in the know still considers the city ready for a Triple-A club, let alone a major league franchise.
In terms of baseball politics, San Antonio has the Astros, Rangers, and Ryans to contend with.
The Alamo City is in the super-market of the Houston Astros, and just close enough to the also-ran Rangers who wouldn’t like another major league club competing with them.
In Central and South Texas there is God, Baseball, and Nolan Ryan. The Ryan family has been developing nearby Austin (See: The Ryan Express - MLN Business of the Year 2004). The Dell Diamond rose from a AA Texas league stadium to a AAA Pacific Coast League facility in 2005. The Ryans then spun off their AA club to Corpus Christi. Good marketing Karma and deep connections to both Major League Baseball and baseball in Texas are theirs.
The Ryans have their eyes on a third major league club in Texas sometime later in the decade. The timing for their market isn’t ideal yet, and sources tell MLN that Mr. Loria would have to exit the scene for the Ryans to consider buying the Marlins. Neither option seems to be in the cards at this time.
The Real Things
Where could the Marlins really go? The likely candidates would be high-drawing Triple-A markets. The two biggest draws in 2004 and 2005 were the Sacramento River Cats and the Memphis Redbirds. They have problems, but one town which has major league teams and more than 6.2 million in population regionally to draw from would be our best bet.
Continued...
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