Don’t plan on a Portland MLB team anytime soon

Landing a team takes more than a stadium. It requires demonstrating a franchise can make money – lots of money

I love baseball. I played baseball through high school and later for 10 years on a Portland adult league. As a kid, I saw my first big league game in Kansas City and cried when Mickey Mantle struck out.

I’ve seen big league games in New York, Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, San Diego and Los Angeles. I saw a World Series game in Oakland. I took in Seattle Pilots games from the bleachers while in college and have been in seats and suites at Seattle’s new domed stadium. I would love to see a MLB team come to Portland. I’m doubtful one will.

The obstacle isn’t the absence of a stadium. The obstacle is money – more specifically, how to make money in a mid-size market with an expansion team and an unproven baseball fan base.

The National Football League earns two-thirds of its revenue from national broadcasts. Major League Baseball only earns 20 percent. MLB teams rise or fall on locally generated revenue from tickets, concessions, promotions, advertising and media. One observer described successful MLB teams as “high-margin retail outlets”.

Baseball and Oregon
Oregonians are big on professional basketball, college football and professional soccer. Professional baseball is more of a meh. Portland hasn’t had a Triple-A minor league baseball team since 2010. The team vanished because its stadium was reconfigured for major league soccer.

The Hillsboro Hops, an A-level minor league team affiliated with the Arizona Diamondbacks, has enjoyed success in the suburbs by focusing on a family-friendly experience. The team invites local residents with spare rooms to house its young players

The Hops and the City of Hillsboro have announced plans to build a new $120 million ballpark adjacent to Ron Tonkin Field. It will be designed to host 300 year-round events, including Hops home games, concerts, festivals, community events and amateur baseball games. It will have 6,000 seats for baseball and 7,000 seats for concerts. This season, the Hops are averaging around 1,800 fans per home game.

Field of Dreams
Following cues from the czars of big league baseball, Portland promoters are focused on building a stadium. They have cycled through several sites. The current favorite is converting the Lloyd Center from a tired shopping center to a trendy baseball venue. The plan is for a cozy 33,000-seat stadium with a retractable roof. If the Lloyd Center fall through, Portland Diamond Project principals might buy the RedTail Golf Course located near Washington Square Mall in Tigard and owned by the City of Portland.

A modern stadium is essential for a new franchise. The bigger question is Portland’s potential to make money from ticket sales, concessions, sponsorships and media deals. For a city losing population and downtown businesses, that could be problematic.

Then there’s the problem of a very long season. A 162-game MLB schedule means 81 home games. The Trail Blazers play 41 regular-season home games, the Portland Timbers play 17 and the Portland Thorns play 11.  If you’ve been a season ticketholder, you know how difficult it can be to attend every game, sell tickets or even give them away.

Just because you have a stadium doesn’t necessarily mean you have a team. The Oakland A’s are a storied franchise, but waning fan support and a troubled urban location led the team to migrate to Las Vegas. Starting in 2025, the A’s will play in its Triple A franchise’s 10,000-seat stadium until a new stadium is completed by 2027. There is a potential snag – the A’s aren’t willing or don’t have the money the Nevada legislature demands for stadium construction.

There is talk of MLB expansion to 32 teams. The list of potential cities includes Portland, along with San Antonio, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Nashville, Charlotte, Mexico City, Tokyo – and maybe has-beens Montreal or Oakland.

Tickets and Making Money
Average MLB season tickets run around $5,000, and more if the team is winning or has superstar players like Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani. Inking and keeping superstars is expensive, and one way or another fans underwrite those huge salaries. Ohtani, who is having a MVP year hitting homeruns and striking out batters, will be a free agent next year and sign a new contract for more than $500 million. His current team, the Los Angeles Angels, may be outbid by the New York Mets. Most teams won’t bother to bid.

The MLB has turned new theme-park stadiums into money-makers with higher-priced tickets for “dugout” seats, upscale concessions and omni-present advertising. HOK Sports, the architectural firm that has designed 19 new or retrofitted MLB stadiums, routinely subtracts seats and adds square footage to make room for amenities and attractions that generate revenue. An HOK executive told Business 2.0: Baseball is in the background. The foreground is the shop that sells spendy team merchandise and the beer garden with a view.

Then there is digital enterprise. MLB.com, big-league baseball’s official website, generates $380 million annually, split evenly among all MLB teams. Much of the website’s revenue comes from streaming baseball games online. Baseball’s digital managers aren’t in dugouts, but have winning strategies that make money. They are so good, they stream 12,000 live events every year, including the NCAA basketball championship.

Regional sports networks broadcast games on local TV stations – a night at the ol’ ballgame in your living room. Following the successful example of other sports, baseball teams are standing up their own cable networks that provide a prime-time marketing vehicle for local advertisers. The YES Network, owned by the Yankees and Goldman Sachs, generates more revenue than the team. The YES Network is valued at $3 billion, three times the valuation of the Yankees.

The take-away: A stadium is the ante, but it takes a lot more than seats and concessions to score a financially winning team. It takes a committed fan base, a covey of corporate sponsors and a digital media network that provides games in homes and bars.

Despite good intentions and ardent optimism, big league baseball in Portland is a pleasant dream, not a plausible reality.  It takes big money to make big money. There’s a reason why Phil Knight wants to buy the Trail Blazers, not launch a new MLB franchise in Portland.

Gary Conkling has been a newsman, congressional aide and public affairs professional for more than 50 years.