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As Major League Baseball looks toward the future, commissioner Rob Manfred has been open about his desire to eventually expand to 32 teams. While MLB needs to sort out the stadium situations with the A’s and Rays before they can fully focus on adding additional franchises, a handful of markets have emerged as potential options for new teams. This week, we’ll take a look at four of the biggest ones. Our first installment focused on Nashville. Today we focus on Portland, Oregon.
PORTLAND — Driving through Portland’s Pearl District on a midsummer morning last year, Craig Cheek pointed toward the low-lying buildings up ahead, with two port cranes rising above them, and said, “You’ll figure out in a hurry why I like this spot.” He turned right into a vacant lot, parked alongside the Willamette River and stepped into the sunshine. There were, at that precise moment, 90 acres between Cheek and the massive blue crane at the far end of the property. One day, he hopes, this industrial site known officially as Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 will have another name: the Diamond District, home to Portland’s Major League Baseball club.
To see it now requires an active imagination or architectural renderings. Cheek, founder of the Portland Diamond Project (PDP), has both. Where one sees a mile of mostly empty buildings, he envisions a 32,000-seat riverfront stadium, high-end hotels, restaurants, food trucks, an amphitheater, a marina and a boardwalk stretching to downtown Portland.
“We really think it would be transformative for the city,” Cheek said.
It’s been more than five years since Cheek, a retired Nike executive, launched PDP in an attempt to position Portland as the top West Coast option for MLB expansion or relocation. Since then, Cheek and managing director Mike Barrett, the former Trail Blazers broadcaster, have pitched investors, scouted locations, commissioned studies, lobbied Oregon politicians and waited for an opportunity to bring an MLB franchise to Oregon.
The essence of their efforts can be distilled to two meetings.
The first was with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred in September 2017, at the league’s offices in midtown Manhattan. According to Cheek, Manfred applauded PDP’s plans and indicated he was excited about Portland as a possible MLB city, though the expansion timeline would wait until the Oakland and Tampa stadium situations were resolved. In return, Cheek had only one request: “Let us know the minute you feel like we’re wasting our time.” Ten days later, in Seattle, Manfred publicly mentioned Portland as an expansion candidate. Cheek and Barrett considered it a tip of the cap in their direction.
The second meeting was with Grammy-winning R&B singer Ciara and her husband, Russell Wilson, in the spring of 2018. Wilson, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback at the time, was the last athlete Cheek had helped bring aboard at Nike before retiring. PDP was looking for 12 initial investors to raise $6 million total in seed capital. Wilson invited Cheek and Barrett to Seattle. They weren’t more than three slides into their presentation when he stopped them and said, “I’m in.” Ciara was too. PDP brought the Wilsons to Portland for a press event, and they went on a helicopter tour to see several proposed stadium sites. The site that entranced them was the marine terminals right on the river’s edge.
Five years later, Cheek stood there in the summer sun.
“I can close my eyes,” he said, “and just see baseball here.”
Raised in the Portland suburb of Sherwood, Orioles rookie Adley Rutschman was 8 when he got his first taste of the majors, attending a Mariners game at Safeco Field, a three and a half hour drive from home. Since it was the closest MLB city, Rutschman said, “that was kind of my home stadium.”
This past summer, in his rookie season, Rutschman returned to Seattle for the first time as a big leaguer, singling in his first at-bat there and homering in his second. With scores of family and friends in attendance, it was as perfect a homecoming as a Pacific Northwest kid could want — unless, one day, that homecoming could be even closer to home. Rutschman, 24, was a freshman at Oregon State when he first learned of PDP’s plans. He remembers the excitement rippling through the local baseball community.
“It would be awesome to have a team there,” he said.
Like Rutschman, Darwin Barney grew up in Portland, rooted for the Mariners and starred at Oregon State. But Barney, 36, is old enough to have played pro ball in Portland, coming to town with Triple-A Iowa in 2009 to face the Portland Beavers. Barney had six hits in that series at PGE Park, where he’d chased foul balls and autographs as a kid. “Man, it was special,” he recalled.
Oregon State assistant coach and former player Darwin Barney (Amanda Loman / Associated Press)
Almost a decade later, Barney bumped into Cheek at a grocery store in Lake Oswego, Ore. Barney had just retired, after 11 seasons in pro ball and 814 MLB games, and was looking for a project to pour his passion into. There in the produce department, Cheek gave the PDP elevator pitch.
“From that day on, I was a believer,” said Barney, who became an early investor.
If those behind PDP had harbored any initial concerns about fan interest — they swear they didn’t — those abated when the project went public, and vanished once Wilson and Ciara were on board. “It wasn’t mission accomplished,” Barrett said, “but, to a certain degree, getting on the map was. Everybody knew us by then.” Barrett and Cheek got emails from strangers asking if they could put down season ticket deposits. They sold out of “MLB PDX” T-shirts. They released ballpark renderings and noticed even the most cautious fans allowing themselves to dream. Whether searching social media or sitting under a PDP-branded tent at a community event, they saw a tidal wave of momentum.
But toward what?
As the calendar now reads 2023, PDP is still stuck in a waiting game with no set end point. MLB has not begun the formal process to expand to 32 clubs, though it appears to be an inevitability. And yet the buzz remains. Barney, now coaching at Oregon State, said he’s regularly stopped by people asking for updates. “They’re ready to support something. I haven’t met a single person who is cynical about it. Everyone is hopeful, but realistic. We’ve done this before.”
Inside the 15th-floor offices of TVA Architects in downtown Portland, Cheek clicked through renderings as Jim Etzel recited previous attempts to make Portland an MLB city. The CEO of Sport Oregon, a nonprofit promoting sports tourism in the state, Etzel remembers seeing then-mayor Vera Katz present her plan to lure the Expos to Portland in 2003. (They went to Washington D.C.) And he recalls Marlins ownership visiting Portland in 2006 when it was considering relocation. (The Marlins got a new stadium and stayed in Miami.)
“Baseball has been a conversation here for decades,” Etzel said. “And that conversation, not just among baseball fans but in the larger business community, is that this could work. Why not Portland?”
There are few more qualified to deliver a Portland baseball history lesson than Etzel, whose first (and favorite) job was bat boy. Etzel’s father was the head baseball coach at the University of Portland for 21 seasons — the field is now named after him — and his grandfather worked the bucket brigade at Vaughn Street Park, putting out fires from cigarette butts beneath the bleachers. Portland has a more storied baseball history than many realize. It’s where a Red Sox scout discovered Ted Williams; where Satchel Paige pitched at age 55; where Luis Tiant, Lou Piniella, “Sudden” Sam McDowell, Joe Tinker and Jim Thorpe played for the minor-league Beavers. The Beavers, however, left Portland in 2010 — after losing PGE Park (now Providence Park) to the MLS expansion team, the Portland Timbers, the team was sold.
Like Cheek and Barrett, Etzel believes the Portland market is underserved by pro sports, especially in the summer months between Trail Blazers seasons. The Blazers once held the sellout record for all major U.S. sports at 814 consecutive home games, from 1977 to 1995; the Timbers sold out all 163 home games in club history prior to the pandemic; the Thorns have had the highest average attendance in every NWSL season since the league was founded in 2013.
“We like to call it Sportland,” Cheek said. “This area punches way above its weight in its sports DNA.”
“We’re like a small city, big town,” Etzel echoed, “but there’s been transformative developments over the last three decades in our city, and I think this is the next great opportunity for an entire district to emerge.”
A rendering of a potential MLB stadium in Portland (Courtesy of PDP)
Among current MLB markets, Portland would be 21st in media market size, 20th in population and 10th in median household income. PDP partnered with economic consulting firms Legends and ECONorthwest to further study the Portland metro market — population 2.5 million — and its trends. Legends surveyed fans and determined that the typical model for anticipated attendance drop-off after the initial honeymoon period for a new franchise may not apply in Portland. “Of all of our challenges — and we’ve put every one of them that we could possibly face on a list — fan support is the least of my concerns,” Barrett said.
Finding the funding for an expansion fee and stadium construction is a considerably greater challenge, but, on this too, Cheek and Barrett appear unconcerned. The groundwork for PDP’s efforts was laid, in a way, when Katz was making a run at the Expos. Oregon legislature passed a bill in 2003 to pay for the construction of a baseball stadium, setting aside $150 million in state-issued bonds that would be repaid with income taxes from player salaries. That money is still available, despite efforts by some in the Oregon State Senate and House of Representatives to dissolve the stadium grant in 2019.
“I’ve never been in favor of it,” Senator Chuck Riley told the Portland Mercury at the time. “It’s taxpayer money. If the taxpayers want to foot the bill for a stadium, they should put it on the ballot and see what happens. I always believe that we should be using the money we have for our most pressing issues, like PERS (Public Employee Retirement System) and education.”
That $150 million still wouldn’t come close to covering the full cost of building a ballpark, much less the price to acquire a franchise. (Manfred has suggested an expansion fee could run as high as $2.2 billion, though some experts dispute that figure. Relocating an existing franchise to Portland wouldn’t require such a fee.) In 2019, The Oregonian reported PDP had $1.3 billion in financial commitments from private investors. Cheek indicated that number is higher today but declined to share specifics.
Where to build a ballpark is a question PDP has sunk substantial resources into answering.
Cheek and Barrett have scouted more than a dozen potential stadium sites in metro Portland — some more seriously than others — and, one beautiful day in July, Cheek gave The Athletic a driving tour of a few.
The first stop was Terminal 1 and Terminal 2. The industrial site truly is picturesque, if you can look past the aging buildings and the grass growing through cracks in the parking lots. There’s the Portland city skyline rising to the south, rolling hills on either side of the Willamette, and Mount Hood visible beyond the Fremont Bridge. But building a stadium here also presents monumental challenges, from addressing zoning and environmental concerns to answering the significant shortage of transportation options.
After PDP spent $150,000 for a traffic study, Cheek envisions a multi-modal transportation solution — with water taxis, streetcars, a pedestrian bridge and a MAX light-rail line eventually stretching to this Diamond District — but it certainly will be costly.
Cheek, Wilson and Barrett (Courtesy of PDP)
Portland mayor Ted Wheeler has said that public money won’t be used to acquire an MLB team or build a stadium, but could go toward developing transportation and other infrastructure needs around a ballpark district. Wheeler’s spokesperson was unable to facilitate an interview for this story. Wheeler provided this statement to The Athletic instead: “I continue to offer my support to the Portland Diamond Project and would love to see an MLB team in Portland. While the prospect is exciting, I am focused on my top priorities — including addressing homelessness, crime, and escalating gun violence in Portland. I will continue to meet regularly with the Portland Diamond Project to hear updates.”
Compared to Terminal 1 and Terminal 2, the second site of Cheek’s driving tour is turnkey: a 33-acre waterfront lot just south of downtown Portland, sandwiched between Tilikum Crossing — a cable-stayed bridge reserved for bikers, pedestrians and public transportation — and the Ross Island Bridge. This lot, Zidell Yards, already is flat and almost empty, used currently for concerts and other outdoor events. The surrounding area is developed, with contemporary Oregon Health and Science University buildings lining the river, and transportation is plentiful. However, while Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 are owned by the Port of Portland, Zidell Yards is privately owned and would be more expensive to acquire, even before the cost of constructing a ballpark district.
Another issue at Zidell Yards is the lack of space. Minnesota’s Target Field has the smallest footprint in the majors, built on 8.5 acres in Minneapolis. Working with Populous, the architecture firm that has designed more than 20 current MLB stadiums, the Portland ballpark design requires 13 acres, according to Cheek, which would leave just 20 acres for further development of a ballpark district at Zidell Yards. In recent years, Cheek asked MLB owners and executives he met what they’d do differently if they were starting a franchise today. He heard the same advice: “They say, ‘Gobble up as much property as you can.’”
Early in their partnership, Cheek and Barrett visited a number of MLB cities to help hone their vision for a ballpark district in Portland. (“We were not bashful about stealing everybody’s best idea and trying to bring it to our market,” Cheek said, with a laugh.) They were drawn to stadiums that revitalized an urban area — Coors Field in Denver; Petco Park in San Diego; Nationals Park in Washington D.C.’s Naval Yards — and to the waterfront ballparks in Pittsburgh and San Francisco. Then they went to Truist Park, in Cobb County outside of Atlanta, and immediately understood the allure of moving to the suburbs.
“We actually like both models,” Cheek said. “We love the whole idea of catalyzing a downtown. But we could dream even bigger out in the suburbs.”
With that, Cheek steered onto the Sunset Highway and headed west. Twenty minutes later, he exited in Beaverton, Ore. The third site — owned by Tektronix, an electronics company that consolidated to a couple office buildings on one corner of its 122-acre campus — was in familiar territory for Cheek, just across an intersection from Nike’s world headquarters. PDP was interested in buying 90 acres. The site is mostly populated by office buildings and parking lots. Raze those and you’d have a blank canvas. Zoning and environmental are minor concerns here, and a MAX line runs directly alongside the property.
Beaverton is not the Willamette waterfront. But it’s an enticing alternative. Navigating through the Tektronix campus, Cheek said he imagined this is how the Braves’ developers felt the first time they saw the 65-acre parcel in Cobb County that would become the Braves ballpark and the Battery. “The more I drive around,” he said, “the more I go, ‘Man, this is a massive opportunity.’”
But it’s never that simple.
PDP pursued the Tektronix property for the next few months, but it went to another buyer this past fall. So, Cheek and Barrett crossed that promising location from their list. Others remain. In recent weeks, Cheek said, there’s been positive momentum toward a partnership between PDP and the City of Portland to explore a large parcel in the Portland metro surrounding area for a potential ballpark district. For now, though, details are scarce.
The whale will be blown up on the outfield grass.
It’s a promise and a warning. The Portland Pickles, a collegiate summer league team playing in a city park in Portland’s Lents neighborhood, were ahead by a dozen runs in the sixth inning of a July game, and yet their fans were still there — happily occupying the bleachers behind home plate, the folding chairs along the foul lines and the picnic tables beyond the chainlink outfield fence. With each Pickles run, grown adults set down their craft beers, hoisted their chairs above their heads and danced to the same techno song. Then they sat again and waited for the night’s grand finale: To memorialize the sperm whale that washed up on the Oregon coast in November 1970 and was blown up, its blubber raining down on bystanders, the Pickles built a cardboard whale replica to explode after the game. Children chanted: “Blow it up! Blow it up!”
A potential Portland MLB franchise could do worse than to channel the creativity of the Pickles, perhaps the most online team in American baseball. They are social media darlings, made famous, maybe most of all, by an incident when the luggage containing the team’s mascot, Dillon T. Pickle, went missing on a return trip from the Dominican Republic. (The saga ended when an anonymous person dropped off Dillon at a doughnut shop.)
A night at Walker Stadium is an experience, a creative vortex, a testament to the city’s credo: Keep Portland weird. There’s a DJ playing music between pitches, a comedian on the mic. Vibes unmatched.
“If you work hard at it, people will come,” said Pickles co-owner Alan Miller, proffering advice to Portland’s prospective MLB owners that baseball fans in Portland can be finicky, at first, but extremely devoted in the end. Miller added: “Also, I would accept half a billion dollars for the name Pickles. Then we would create some kind of a partnership so we would just continue to make cool hats with them. Everybody wins.”
When Cheek wants to check the pulse of a younger generation of Portland baseball fans, he goes to a Pickles game or calls the guys behind the lifestyle brand Baseballism — Jonathan Loomis, Jonathan Jwayad, Travis Chock and Kalin Boodman, who met playing club baseball at Oregon and live in Portland, running an apparel company and recently expanding into the bar and restaurant industry.
They tell Cheek a baseball stadium in Portland should be something that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the majors. Cheek has ideas for what might sizzle, though it may not all be plausible or practical: a food truck courtyard, bike tailgates, breweries, a gondola moving across the outfield, a ticket that gets you three different vantage points throughout the game (“What if you were in a beer garden for three innings, then in a gondola going across the outfield, then sitting on the first-base line?”), a double-sided video screen so you could watch the game from inside or outside the ballpark, and even a transparent retractable roof.
“If the branding is right, the messaging is right and the stadium experience is correct, you’re going to be successful. There’s no doubt,” Jwayad says, “Once it gets here, there’s no issue. People are rabid about sports in this town. The hurdle is getting it here. It’s a no-brainer once it lands.”
Back in his car as the driving tour concluded, Cheek answered a call from Larry D’Amato, a former MLB scout now consulting for PDP.
“Did you hear what the commissioner said?” D’Amato asked.
Speaking during All-Star festivities in Los Angeles two days prior, Manfred declined to discuss the league’s timeline for expansion, saying that resolving the Oakland and Tampa stadium situations remained the immediate priority. It was the same non-answer Manfred has given for years, and yet, D’Amato sensed impatience and frustration from Manfred when pressed further about the Athletics’ future in Oakland.
“We’ll see,” Cheek said.
He was unconvinced. In 2019, an MLB official told The Athletic’s Jayson Stark that Portland “is the most organized of all the cities bidding for a team.” That may still be true. The whole point, for Cheek and Barrett, was to be as prepared as possible; to put Portland in a better position than it was when the Expos relocated; to be the first horse at the starting gate when MLB’s expansion race began.
But now Cheek and Barrett worry about fatigue: for fans, for investors, for themselves. PDP had a surge of fan interest in its first few years, stirred by renderings and news releases and community appearances, and it blew past 70,000 signatures on an online petition. But in time, Cheek and Barrett realized they couldn’t sustain that momentum when the ball was in MLB’s court, not theirs. So, when the pandemic silenced the sports world, Cheek and Barrett laid low. They made progress and, this time, kept it quiet.
Cheek believes the spigot is starting to turn. He and Barrett are talking about “momentum 2.0”: “We’re getting a little bit more optimistic that it’s appropriate and now it’s needed to pour some gas on it.”
Still, they are aware of the lack of certainty. They both have declined job opportunities to focus on PDP, but they may not continue to turn those down forever.
“We signed up for five years,” Cheek said in July. “We’re in that fifth year. We do believe it’s getting close. If you ask us, honestly and humbly, would you sign up for another five? I’m not sure. I’m not sure that’s possible. I’m not sure that’s feasible. I’m not sure that makes sense. But, clearly, we’re in it to win. All you can do is kind of ride with the info you have. We see the next six to 12 months being imperative to understanding the trajectory of the project.”
And what if it fails?
That question made Cheek wince. He is an optimist, but he also understands the odds. MLB could wait another 10 years to expand. It could, theoretically, never expand. Or it could choose another West Coast city, like Las Vegas. It’s possible, Cheek said, and there’s no way around it: That would feel like defeat.
“We kind of have adopted the Apollo 13: failure is not an option,” Cheek said. “That’s the glass half full, eternal optimist in us. I think there would be massive disappointment that we couldn’t get it done. But I’ll bet there would also be no regrets. We took our shot. We calculated the opportunity. We knew it was risky. The people that are associated with us know the same. We’ve been very transparent. We don’t know if we can pull this off.”
Barrett jumped in: “There are things outside of our control that can help the project go either way. Something can happen outside of our control, and suddenly the doors swing open. And there are things that could lightly close it. I don’t think it’ll ever be slammed shut.”
They think back to that first conversation with Manfred, at the MLB offices five years ago, and the request they made of him: Tell us when we’re wasting our time. So far, that call has not come.
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