Crying about the Beavers last game at PGE Park, the Oregonian's frumpiest sports columnist, John Canzano, considers a minor-league baseball team necessary "infrastructure" and transportation plans "silly" and "visionless."
Guilty, too, is the visionless City Council. That's you Nick Fish, Dan Saltzman, Amanda Fritz. Tinkers to Evers to Chance, they ain't. Fellow city Commissioner Randy Leonard stood alone, pushing to create jobs and build a ballpark, against a wall of apathy. The other commissioners, and the mayor who ran on a platform that promised new ideas, instead sat in the shadows, shrugging atone another, afraid to ask Portland to act like a major city.Oh, we have an aerial tram, that ran four times ($57 million) the original budget. And we have those silly bike lanes and a $613 million Portland Bicycle Plan. But what Portland doesn't have after today is a Triple-A baseball team playing in a ballpark where you can bring your family. A piece of the infrastructure of a city just got ripped out.
I'll think about that every time I see the underused bike lanes and that blasted empty tram running overhead. And you should never forget the names of the politicians who were on watch the next time you go to cast a vote. Adams — Fritz — Saltzman and Fish. As dreams for the city go, that's some Murderer's Row.
What kind of city does Portland want to be?
All this sensationalist, anti-bike, sports as "infrastructure" B.S. aside, Canzano's argument crumbles in that we're essentially trading a minor-league baseball team for a major-league soccer team. If I accepted the notion that sports franchises determine a city's direction—which I don't—wouldn't embracing soccer, the global sport, over baseball, a withering, 20th century American mess, show "vision" in an ever-flattening world?
Pining for minor-league baseball is like longing for the days of black and white TV, when you walked uphill both ways to school. Sorry Gramps, but you can't put lipstick on conservatism and call it vision.