On the clock

For a long, long time I was a big fan of the sport of baseball in general, and certain baseball teams in particular.

One of my fondest memories was as an older kid - I'd have been about 12 - loafing around the big old house in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn during long summer afternoons. My mother would be on "her porch", the shady-side former sleeping porch (that would have been a must-have in muggy pre-airconditioning Illinois summers for a house built in 1905), knitting and listening to the Cubs game on the radio.

"The Cubs will shine in '69" she'd say, mimicking the club slogan that season.

They didn't, of course, that being the now-famous Miracle Mets year. But, still...

That, and my parents' backgrounds growing up in the Thirties and Forties, when baseball was THE professional sport, was enough to get me started as a baseball fan. 

My affection transferred to the great Philadelphia Phillies teams when we moved to southwestern Pennsylvania in the summer of 1974, and stayed with the club through the Eighties while I gypsied around the Army.

When I moved out to Portland in the summer of 1990 I found no major league club. The Portland baseball team was, instead, a high-minor (AAA) team then run by the Minnesota Twins organization. The Portland Beavers were a Pacific Coast League leftover that had been a regular when the PCL was the "western major league" but since the MLB expansion to the Left Coast had been in and out - mostly out - since the 1970s.

But baseball is baseball, so I started going to the old Civic Stadium to root, root, root for the Bevos.

I was about the only one.

The photo above is from the early Oughts - the field was sponsored by Portland General Electric at that point (between 2001 and about 2010) and called "PGE Park" - but whether it was the Nineties or the Oughts, whether you called in The Civic, PGE, Jeld-Wen Field, or Providence Park (which it is now) the "crowds" were the same:

Weren't.

I'm not sure why, exactly.

Portland has always had a pretty vocal contingent of baseball wanna-haves, including several of the bigger sportswriting names (some joker named Dwight Jaynes was always kinda insane on that issue), who agitate for throwing taxpayer dollars at getting a new baseball park and a team.

But when we HAD an actual team?

Nobody came to see 'em.

I mean...look at the picture. There's probably more people on the field than around it. And that was how it was, consistently, after the Twins-owned Beavers were stolen in 1993. Didn't matter; Single A Rockies (a Colorado farm) or AAA Beavers (a San Diego farm)...the public didn't turn out in droves.

It wasn't that the clubs were awful. The early Nineties Beavs were a hell of a club, with several players who had decent careers in the Show, and even the ones who didn't were a lot of fun. My personal favorite was an Dominican outfielder named Bernardo Brito Perez who usually went by just Brito.

He was the real-life version of the "Crash" Davis character in Bull Durham or the Serrano character in Major League; a minor league slugger who never had quite enough of the right stuff to make the jump up to the bigs.

In Brito's case it was the Deuce.

He managed to win a couple of PCL home run titles by sheer power, but in the two seasons I saw him in Portland it was the same deal. Every spring he'd come out blasting. AAA pitchers are like all pitchers everywhere; they come up through the minors with a big fastball and they like throwing fastballs. So they'd see this big lug and figure, "I'll just give this joker my heat".

And Brito'd park the heat in the deep right field seats.

So the next time the pitcher saw El Pupo they'd listen to their coach. Brito wouldn't see anything but curveball, curveball, slider, changeup.

Brito couldn't fucking hit the curve to save his life.

So by the end of the season he'd be picking off mistakes and hangers, and looking more frustrated by the game. He never did figure out how to hit the deuce, and so he never got more than a cup of coffee in the Show, and was retired by the mid-Nineties.

But when he was going good? He was, like a lot of the other Beavs, a lot of fun.

But the fans never came.

Finally the old Civic got a full-on soccer pitch makeover and the baseball club was out in the cold; the new owner sold them and they ended up in El Paso as the Chihuahuas and no, I'm not kidding.

The old Civic was a really weird place for baseball.

For one thing, the dimensions were freakish because of the long-versus short-axes were utterly skewed by the construction as a mostly-football-field. 

The Civic was unusual in that the mound-to-plate went southeast-to-northwest instead of the northeast direction recommended by the league. That was because of the location of the seats; at the north and west sides. The south end was an empty lot between the outfield fence and the huge brick north facade of the property owner, the Multnomah Athletic Club.

The east side might have been the weirdest of all, an immense (like, two-story high) vertical wall. Although the dimensions were supposed to be pretty close - about 320 feet down both the left and right-field foul lines - the Green Monster left-field wall made the left field feel like a short porch, and I think it got a lot of visitors to go with a more left-handed lineup than they would have otherwise.

Dead center? Death Fucking Valley. I don't think I ever saw anyone put one out over the deep centerfield wall.

Oh, and since we're talking about the old barn...one of the other weird things about it was the wall signs on that big left field wall.

I mean...prime real estate for ads, right?

One of the most iconic was a Jantzen swimwear "diving girl". You can barely see her arching her way down the wall in this 1982 shot from the high east side seats:

You gotta blow this shot up a LOT, and here's a detail from a shot in a collection of photos from the early Oughts that shows her a little better:

If you walked down to the front row of bleachers and looked down you'd notice that the pool of rainwater that accumulated in the small of her back and the crack of her ass was typically a nice verdant Pacific Northwest algae-green.

The groundskeepers obviously didn't get paid enough to scrub her butt for her.

Interestingly, when the soccer makeover in the Teens destroyed the old left field wall the diving girl was rescued and moved over to an interior wall above the west concourse...

 

...where she flies today, still caught in mid-dive.

Oh, and since we're talking about the Jantzen Girl...her companion over on the wall was this guy; the Henry Weinhard's "Gooooo Beavers" guy:

My recollection is that this ad was a pre-digital-era live-action thing, too. The Henry's guy folded up into a "sitting" position when nothing was happening (which, I'm sure you're shocked to know, isn't all that unusual in baseball...) but when a rally was going on or somebody parked one could be pulled up to raise his go-Beavers sign.

The whole thing is kinda sad, too, in that it's a reminder of the sort of brewer's nightmare that the US was for half a century.

Henry Weinhard was a real guy, a German immigrant who brewed your basic lager here in Portland from the 1850s until after the national brand invasions in the 1950s to 1970s.

It was still a decent commercial lager brewed at the old stand in the Pearl downtown until the Stroh's combine bought it, peddled it to the Miller conglomerate, who shut down the old brewhouse.

It took over a century, but the Schludwiller people finally won.

All of this is kind of just a stroll down Portland baseball-memory-lane...but I DO have a point in all of this.

Specifically, I'm reading that this season MLB is going to have a "pitch clock". From the linked article:

"Baseball hopes to reverse that trend this year, with a 15-second clock for each pitch when the bases are empty, and 20 seconds with runners on base. In addition, batters will be limited to one timeout per at-bat, and there will also be a 30-second timer between hitters. (The sport is making other changes, including banning the defensive infield shift to generate more offense, and making bases slightly larger to increase safety and possibly jumpstart stolen base attempts. All the new rules will be in effect for spring traininggames, which begin February 24 ahead of the 2023 season Opening Day on March 30.)"

Now. I'm older than dirt. If ever there should be a person who shouts at the baseball clouds that this "clock" is rank obscenity and a defilement of the Sacred Game it should be me. But y'know what?

Fuck that.

I can't watch pro baseball anymore because it's So. Fucking. Goddamn Slow.

Pitchers fucking around endlessly. Batters stepping out after every pitch. The tyranny of the home run.

I was too young to really know the baseball of the early Sixties, before the lower mound rule of 1968, but I was told by fans my father's age that it was the deadliest, boringest, slowest, most excruciating baseball they'd ever seen; two teams both dominated by power pitchers playing games decided by whose heater got up in the other teams' sluggers wheelhouse.

Ugh.

I still enjoy watching baseball in person (and thanks, Pop, for teaching me how to score...) but on television?

My life's not long enough for that shit.

Mind you, there's still people who ARE bitching:

"For more than 150 years, the lack of a clock on the field has distinguished baseball from other major US team sports, and some baseball purists are sure to object to adding one. “There’s no clock in baseball. And there’s no clock in baseball for a reason,” now-New York Mets star pitcher Max Scherzer said in 2019."

Yeah, well, good luck with that if you WANT your sport to go the way of American jazz; become the fading property of the Old and the White. There's a reason so many good young athletes (especially Black) don't play baseball anymore; it's boring as fuck.

I wish I could find it online, but Bill James wrote a good piece on long boring games when the trend towards long boring games started to be noticeable back in the Eighties (or Nineties).

His main point was that for all people like Scherzer's bullshit about how "there's no clock in baseball" there WAS a clock in baseball and had been since the pro game emerged in the 19th Century.

It was the sun.

Ballgames (except on Saturday, and Saturday games back in the day were often doubleheaders...) had to start in late afternoon (because the fans needed to be off work) so the game had to be wrapped up before sundown.

Umpires in the day had one other job; to hustle the game along to make that happen.

James' contention was that the first generation of night-game umpires and players had grown up in the sport with that, so the tradition of hustling the game along continued until that generation aged out some time in the late Sixties or Seventies.

The thing is, dicking around is in the interests of both the pitcher - especially with runners on, who has to pitch out of the stretch AND check the runners - and the batter, who wants to throw off the pitcher's timing and work the count.

It's NOT in the interests of the fans, who would rather not watch the pitcher thrown down to first half a dozen times in an at-bat or watch the batter step out to scratch his nuts.

So.

As an old Portland baseball fan?

Go, go gadget clock!

And if the new rules work? Would I go to baseball games again?

 

Sure!

Just don't ask me for my tax dollars to build a new stadium, though. Fuck that, too.

You build it?

I'll come.

With my scoresheet, beer, and peanuts in hand.

Because it's still a great game.

 

The Rich People's Game

 

If you've been a follower of this joint for a while you've probably noticed that I'm a bit of a soccer fan.

And you'd be right; I've supported the local soccer clubs, the men's Timbers and the women's Thorns, since before the men were up in the Show and from the day the women started playing over ten years ago.

Plus I've been a Newcastle supporter for even longer - the Toon caught me back in the Shearer years of the 90's (I've never forgiven Ferguson and the ManU mob for stealing the crown in the 1995-96 season. Bastards.) - and so for the past thirty-odd years my life has been steeped in the Beautiful Game.

I'm a founding member of the "Axe Society", the season ticket holders from the Timbers' first big-league season in 2011.

I've stood and sung in the cold rain of October and the burning sun of August. I damn near tore out the walls of the cheap hotel in Medford, locked out of the playoff run of 2015 by a work assignment, during the insane 22-round-of-penalties "Double Post" game. 

 

I've been, as the tifo says, a Rain or Shine Supporter since the beginning of the modern Timbers era in 2001.

But no more.

Last year, with retirement looming and the cost of my season pass reaching almost $1,000 I gave up the place I've had in the Shed End for over twenty years.

And this season the club has moved its televised matches to the Apple+ streaming service...meaning that even to watch the Boys I'd need eighty bucks for the service AND another eighty for the MLS "Season Pass".

And that's without the cost of any single game tickets I might hope to nick off the spendy SeatGeek app. 

Look.

I get it. This is what I and you and all of us should expect from Late Stage Capitalism. Soccer is Big Money. Everyone in the game - players, owners, broadcasters, sponsors - wants a piece of the action. Nobody wants to leave a penny on the ground if there's cash to be made.

Here's the thing, though.

We. We, the fans, are the cow that's being milked. It's our wallets that all these people are hoovering, our support that's being mulcted to make the providers of the game a fucking buck.

And that's just getting real tiring.

I love this game. I love my town. I love our teams and I want to support them.

But it's getting real fucking old that every time I put my scarf on I turn around and there's another sonofabitch expecting to be hit in the palm.

I don't expect the Boys to play for free. I get it; it costs money to run a big-league team.

But.

It seems self-defeating to monetize every fucking aspect of the sport. It seems stupid to price everyone but the wealthy out of the "people's game".

Footy rose on the shoulders of the working men and women of England, Scotland, France, Argentina and Brazil and even here in the Americas.

But now?

When my beloved Toon is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Saudi oil sheiks?

When I can no longer sit down and enjoy seeing my Timbers struggle to a dreary midweek draw with the Houston Dynamo without paying Steve Jobs' heirs?

When it seems like the entire sport is sloshing with money yanked out of the people's pockets?

I just feel like Smokey the Bear standing silent as all the forest around me burns.

Falling Timber, Green Shoots

I've been working out of town steadily for the past several weeks, so my home life has been reduced to weekends.

The only problem with that is that, when I get home...I don't want to just sit at home.

My Bride, dearly as I love her, doesn't have "get-out-of-the-house" sorts of interests. She likes to sew, and she is part of one of our local rowing clubs. She loves "binning", going to the infamous GoodWill Bins that I wrote about back on '09. And re-arranging the living room furniture.

My kids have videogames (for the Boy) and crafts, stories, and all sorts of creative fun (for the Girl).

But I like to get out a bit.

So this morning we loaded up the car with wife and kid and friends-of-kid and drove up into the Coast Range, into the Deep Woods, to the annual "Blessing of the Log", the ceremonial Choosing of the douglas-fir Pole that will serve the Timbers soccer club's lumberjack mascot as a tally for goalscoring and goalkeeping (when a Timber scores - or a Timbers keeper keeps a clean sheet - the lumberjack saws off a slice from the log, a tradition going back to the Seventies).

The day was cool and damp but not raining, and the roads were quiet all through the farmlands that cling to the west edge of the Tualatin Valley and up into the wooded hills of the Coast Range. Dark firs and bare maples dripped steadily as we passed through the Sunset Corridor, as the state calls Highway 26 that is named for the old 41st Division of WW2.

I have been this way many times and it has changed very little in the almost thirty years I have lived here. The clearcuts wander about, appearing suddenly where a stand of heavy timber was the winter before, then gradually blurring away as the new crop of future dimension lumber, plywood, and paper pulp grows over the bare hillsides rugged with stump and slashpiles.

An early stop for coffee and cocoa help quiet the drive out to the morning's meetingplace at Camp 18.

As I was writing this I looked back through the GFT archives and discovered to my surprise that I have never really talked much about this joint. It's...well, it's a fascinating mashup of genuinely worthwhile roadside attraction, good restaurant, and kitschy tourist trap.

The building itself is a treasure, a huge log cabin complete with enormous single-tree ridgepole and massive old-growth timber front doors. The huge stone hearths help take the chill off a winter's day, and the food is plentiful and savory. If there's anything my Girl appreciates it's a good tuck-in, and she and her pal Lulu got around the outside of a hell of a lot of eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns, and the immense cinnamon rolls that the Camp is known for.

After the breakfast - and a visit to the gift shop and a stroll around the old logging equipment that serves as part of the museum to the old life in the Coast Range woods - it was time for the annual Blessing of the Log.

This event is the ceremonial start of the Timbers' soccer fan's season. A piece of a raw douglas-fir log donated by one of the local timber companies (this year it was Hampton Lumber of Willamina; thanks, guys!) is brought to Camp 18, where an assembled group of fans, and their friends, kids, and even their pets troop out into the chilly morning to offer up their hopes for the coming year. One of the song leaders - the capos - leads the group in the "blessing"...

"May your home be strong of beam,
Firm of wall and rafter,
Built with Timbers from a dream,
Girded well with laughter.
May your home have a winding stair
With a lovers landing,
Windows to let in fresh air
With the light of understanding.
May your home have a roof of faith
For every change of weather
And love upon your hearth
To warm your years forever."

...that concludes with a roar of "Go, Timbers!"

That was enough for my kiddos; they weren't prepared to stay longer and plant trees so full of lumberjack breakfast and companionship our group returned Bob the Subaru through the wooded hills and spitting rain back to Portland again; the kids to their busy-ness, my Bride to a nap, and I to a quiet afternoon, dreaming dreams of future glory.

Barefoot in the rain

Speaking of fun things to do in Portland...

I often tell this to visitors and they refuse to believe it, but a genuine Portland woman is nearly immune to the cold from the ankles down.

The Timbers match Sunday was chilly and cold, but I saw at least three women who planned to sit or stand for an hour and a half in the cold rain in their flip-flops, like this gal:

Or this one:

My absolute favorite of the day, though, was the twenty-ish woman I bumped into in the Dutch Bros coffee-stand like who was wearing the Most Portland Things Ever - flip-flops on her feet but fuzzy warm gloves on her hand.

I laughed openly and asked her if I could take her picture because she was just so perfect. She agreed and admitted that she knew it seemed strange but that her hands got cold and her feet really didn't. And that she doubted that anyone else had come to the game in their sandals, at which point I assured her that others had, indeed - at least two others and probably more.

I should note that this is 1) typically a woman thing - though I'm seeing more men walking around in sandals in the winter recently - probably because their sandals are nicer and they take better care of their feet so they're prettier to see, and 2) only for the Rainy Season. When the snow arrives even a true Puddletowner finds the cold a little too biting. But...often the retreat is only tactical; it's not uncommon to see sandals-over-socks in the deep Winter months. Even then.

Don't get me wrong; the boots and sneakers and shoes far outnumbered the bare feet. But it warms my heart (if not my feet) that our Oregon gals are out there repping.

Cold feet and warm hearts? Yeah, that's how we roll here in the Rose City.

Wherein I beg for money.

I don't normally beg for money.

Well, okay, there's the whole "standing at the Rosa Parks offramp with the "I need whisky" sign" thing, but, hey...sometimes there must be whisky regardless of the household budget.

But. This September I'm taking part in an Alzheimers fundraiser. I'm part of a group that's walking for Jimmy Conway, a player from the old NASL Timbers. But I'm also taking part for my own father, the Master Chief, who died of - I suspect as much as the stroke that carried him off - mortification that he was losing his mind to senility.

IT's no big thing. I walk around Portland International Raceway with a group of friends from the Timbers Army. LAst year I made it barely past the start house before my bad hip forced me to stop. This year I'm gonna make it all the way around, dammit. The Master Chief would expect nothing less.

So. I'm putting this here in hopes that you might toss a few dollars into my tin for Jimmy, and Jack Lawes and I promise - promise! - that this time I won't spend it on whisky.

If you follow the link above, I'm down there on the bottom right; John Lawes. Click "donate".

Thanks.

No whisky this time. Really. Swear ta God.

Playing off

Did I mention that my beloved Timbers won the Major League Soccer title this season?

Oh, yeah. Sorry.

So I've walked around just slightly pleased this entire December because of this, and I just realized why because I watched Rog and Davo talking with the lovely and intelligent Rebecca Lowe on Men in Blazers last night.

Turns out that the Lovely Rebecca is a Crystal Palace supporter (see the little stuffed eagle on Davies' shoulder? That's "Kayla", Palace's eagle mascot). She was talking about the distress that Manchester United fans are feeling this season even though the Scum are within the top half of the Premiership table and in a position that fans of other, more mundane, (read: Palace) clubs would normally consider supremely enviable.

But that for ManU fans this is anything but. The Red Devils have been losing and drawing, not scoring, and generally looking moderately crap for much of the 2015 campaign, and this gives the over-accustomed-to-success-ManU-fans huge, huge sadz.

Lovely Rebecca's observation was that this was because these overprivileged mamzers were, in her words, "forced to face Life", that is, Life as the Rest of Us have to live it; full of disappointments, failures, heartbreak, people we love who like us "as friends", movies starring anyone ever appearing on American Idol, nonalcoholic beer.

And that hit be right between the eyes because the story of a Portland Timbers fan has been failure for nearly 40 years.

The original Timbers came oh-so-close, going to the old NASL "Soccer Bowl" championship match in 1975 but losing to Tampa Bay.

Between that year and last month the closest the Timbers ever came was...close.

We won the old USL in league play - winning the "Commissioner's Cup", the regular season record - in 2009 but proceeded to shit the bed against the damn Vancouver Whitecaps. We won the Western Conference in league play in 2013 but failed to beat Real Salt Lake for the conference playoff.

That's kind of been the "Portland Story"; win regular season games, go to the playoffs, lose.

Until, two years ago...

The Portland Thorns had a fraught season in 2013. Starting the season ripping out five wins and a draw the Thorns were top of the table in the middle of May. But by mid-June the team had slipped down to third of eight. In August the team lost two, drew one, and won one, nearly dropping out of championship contention.

Portland went to Kansas City to play the Blues - who had split the season series 1-1-1 with them including a home defeat in August - and shipped two goals in the first thirty minutes. The team looked beaten and out of ideas.

But some of the players refused to lay down and die. Tobin Heath scored just after the half hour. Christine Sinclair finished a brilliant run dishing to Tiff Weimer who scored just past the hour mark. And Allie Long drove the nail in 18 minutes into overtime.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, impossibly, for the final 210 minutes of the 2,190 minutes the Thorns played in 2013 the team played like...well, champions. They crushed Western New York in the championship match to win the first NWSL title.

The storyline of this Timbers season is freakishly similar.

At the beginning of October the Timbers stood in seventh place in the MLS Western Conference, out of playoff contention having lost a gutting 1-nil home decision to Sporting Kansas City. The team had scored only 31 goals in 31 games.

They were out of the Open Cup. They had finished behind both Vancouver and Seattle in the Cascadia Cup.

It looked like lights out.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, impossibly, the Timbers began to win.

They won their last three regular season matches to finish third in the Western Conference.

They won an insane play-in round match against Kansas City that went to twelve rounds of penalty kicks after 120 minutes.

They comfortable disposed of the Vancouver and Dallas sides that had finished above them in the West.

Then they won the championship match.

Both Portland's professional soccer teams have now won their leagues. Within two years of each other. Both teams will now wear the star above the club crest that forever shines as the sign of a championship season.

I have to confess something here.

I'm not a big fan of "playoffs", in any sport. My feeling has always been you play a sports season to decide who's the best. You win the season, you win all the matches, you win. You're the champion. That's it. No frigging "wild cards", no "play-ins", no gimmicks. Play the games, win, that's it.

But boy friggin' howdy am I glad that the outfits that run American soccer don't think like I do.

Champions

My beloved Portland Timbers are the 2015 Champions of professional soccer in the U.S.

There really isn't more to be said, but, being who I am, I will say more after I've taken some time to simply sit and smile. In September this team seemed headed out of contention altogether. Today they are the champions. This season has been a ridiculous, improbable dream and, as such, perhaps all the more wonderful. I will have some thoughts later, but for now, the taste of victory is sweet.

We're going to the Final..!

You'll have to excuse me. But it's time to have what G.M. Fraser's pipey would have called a "wee gloat"...

We're going to the Final! Weeee're going to the Fiii-inal! We're best in the West, we stood the test, we're going to the Fiii-iii-nal!

Sorry. You may now return to your regularly scheduled bloggage.

I lathered him with me shillelagh

...for he trod on the tails o' me coat.

Normally it's just the walking stick I use to take the weight off my bad leg. But last Sunday it was me shillelagh as I went walkin' in honor of two men I hold (or held) dear; my own father, and the former Timbers great Jimmy Conway of Dublin.

Conway is dying of the disease that killed my father, robbed of his life by the death inside his own head. He lives on in the hearts of his friends Mick Hoban and "Timber" Jim Serrill and through them to those of us who know them. When Mick sent out a call for the Timbers soccer community to join in the Alzheimer's Walk the past Sunday I was proud to join. I hobbled alongside my Bride as far down the track - the event was held out at North Portland's motor racetrack - as I could before we headed back home. I wish I could do more, but I'm not a physician or a neurologist. All I can do is walk and damn little of that. But walk I can, and did.

To the immortal memory, pop. I hope you and Jimmy raise a glass to yourselves wherever it is that the souls of the living dead are gone.

Drachma the kitten on a bathrobe

Whilst I'm trying to find the time to continue my Panama tales, I should mention that we have a new little fellow in the Little House:

This ia Drachma. Yes, like the Greek money; the Boy is a great Percy Jackson fan and a mythology buff in general, and it was his idea to get a little kitten. So we headed out to the Cat Adoption Team in Sherwood for "Kittenpalooza" and, sure enough, found an adorable kitten; this little guy.

He's very sweet and playful, so much so that he's won everyone's hearts except for Nitty Kitty, who sees him as a pest and a nuisance and hisses at him every chance she gets. Which he totally doesn't get; he thinks the Big Kitty is cool and wants to investigate her and, therefore, really is a pest and a nuisance...

So we're trying to mollify poor Nit whilst trying to conceal the existence of Nitty's cat-flap from the little guy. We just don't want him getting outside yet; he's too little and the neighborhood raccoons and stray dogs (and coyotes and who-knows-what-else...) are too dangerous. We'll see how THAT works out.

I should note in passing that this season has been a terrible one for my Portland Timbers. Right now we're sitting dead last in the MLS West and our playoff hopes are pretty much dead. So this season has become one of those sorts of seasons that try the souls of true supporters. It just doesn't feel right not to sing and chant for the team...and yet, it's hard to deny that the team is truly bad. Players that had terrific years last year have regressed to their mean, while newcomers haven't worked out. The team as a whole is just a hot mess.

On the women's side the Portland Thorns have had their troubles, as well. Not as bad as the Timbers, but with several of the game's top players the Girls in Red are scrapping for the last playoff spot rather than crusing to a defense of their 2013 title. It was lovely to enjoy a 7-1 thrashing of the visiting Kansas City Blues this past Sunday, but the win left me with a real conundrum.

I am one of those idiotic fans that have irrational superstitions about games. I have a beloved Timbers jersey from the minor-league years I wear to every home match in hopes that the tiny spark of individual mojo will spur the team on to victory. On the Thorns side this season has been a shuffle through a series of team scarves.

I started out wearing my season ticket-holder scarf from last season and the result was a cascade of losses and draws. So I retired that scarf and turned to the red-and-black striped scarf of the "Rose City Riveters" supporters' group.

No luck.

So the whole connection between that and this post is that Sunday I unfurled the comical gimmick "Too Balls Is Too Many" scarf that the Riveters doped up to help a local cat charity. The "Feral Cat Coalition" is an outfit that specializes in catching these wild moggies and snipping out their girl- and boy-bits. The scarf itself is kind of a hoot, with a lurking cat face at one end (with a rather evil expression that pretty much says without words "you bastards, you cut my balls off..!") and the Riveters logo at the other,

And the team responded with a seven-goal outburst, hammering the visiting Kansas City Blues 7-1; who would have ever thought that describing a soccer team as "...just like watching Brazil!" would be a huge insult?

So. As much fun as it was, I'm stuck in my superstitious bind with my ridiculous cat scarf until we defend the championship or the season ends.

Mee-ow!

Fish Guts

I could barely concentrate on work today.

I was jittery and nervous, I had a fluttery stomach almost as bad as before a match in rec league soccer when I played 'keeper. By four p.m. I was utterly useless and gave up, spending the last hour at "work" surfing the soccer websites to read up on my Timbers' second leg match against the Seattle Sounders for a place in the Western Conference finals.

I haven't written much about the Timbers this season, but it's not that I haven't been caught up in my sport and my team. It's been a hell of a ride, too. The team that looked a complete shambles last season has reassembled itself under our new coach Caleb Porter and finished top of the table in the MLS West, only to face our old ancient enemy, Seattle, in the semis.

So I trudged down the hill from the dark side street where I left Stinky the Honda with my rainsuit in hand and my Army scarf around my shoulders. The night was cold and blustery and the rain came down in gusts, slicking the drifts of fallen leaves and shattering the streetlight into multicolored arcs. The fluttering in my gut only got worse as I approached the old Civic Stadium and heard the sound of the traveling Sounders supporters roaring out their fish-songs of love and hate for their rivals.

I won't tell you more; you don't really care, and if you did you'd have been there, singing amid the crowd at the North End, or at the edge of your couch at home swearing and bouncing as the game swayed to and fro. But sufice to say that in the end the Timbers ran out the winners, 3-2 on the night and 5-3 on aggregate. Their reward, if you want to call it that, is to face our hoodoo team, Real Salt Lake, in the Western finals.

But sufficient to that day is the Rimando thereof. Tonight is a night of pure joy, a redemption of the suffering of last season and a balm for my own conviction that as a Portlander we are doomed to suffer depthless disappointment, that our heroes will always find the kryptonite, that we will raise our hopes only to end with our heads in our hands despairing.

But not tonight. No. Not tonight.

Tonight is for the cold rain and the smoky taste of the whiskey and the pure, vaulting joy of lifting my voice to sing for triumph. Tonight is for victory, and the hopes of tomorrow. Because...

"...there's a party in Portland,"

"No one's sleeping tonight!"

Fool for Love

In the tarot the Fool is traditionally shown dancing heedlessly along the edge of a precipice with a white cat tearing at his britches.

There are times when being a Timbers fan feels a lot like that.

This entire past weekend was a rainy, blustery mess. My kids' soccer matches Saturday were cancelled for the bad weather; no matter, the Boy and I drove down to Custer Park in SW Portland and had a kickabout in the piss-pouring rain anyway.

By late Sunday morning I was grainy and sore with the nagging cold I've been fighting for a week or so. So the last thing I really wanted to do was stand for two hours in the cold rain and sing for my team to beat last year's champions.

But when you're a hardcore fan, you go. You go.

So I put on my hoodie and my rainsuit (but not my lovely waterproof boots, sitting alone, warm, and dry in my Beaverton office) and boarded the MAX train downtown. Trudged though the streaming streets to the field. Got my $6.75 beer and stood watching the raindrop splashes between sips as my feet steadily grow colder and wetter.

I wonder, really, I wonder sometimes what it feels like to be a supporter of one of those huge, eternally successful clubs. The Manchester Uniteds, the Bayern-Munichs, the Milans, the Corinthians, the Paris-Saint-Germains.

Do you stroll to the stadium every Saturday with a light heart and a cheerful mien, full of bonhomie, bursting with optimism and eagerness to be at the hapless opponent? Do you treat every minute of the match as a sunny morning, gleaming with promise and hopes of a happy day? Do you greet your team's goals with a roar of fulfilled expectation, a culmination of promise fulfilled?

What's it like, to feel that way?

I wonder.

Here in the Portland Timbers hustings every match feels more like...well, a man named Garry Nelson wrote a book about his time as player/manager for the English fourth-division side Torquay United called Left Foot in the Grave.

That's kind of what it feels like.

When the club is playing at its' best things are fine. Just...fine.

But a lot of the time they aren't. A lot of the time the match feels desperate, balanced on the edge of a disaster. Your big, successful club has fathoms of depth and acres of skill. Your marginal club - and I don't pretend that my club is anything but a marginal club, one of the smaller markets making its way on savvy and scrap - doesn't have that comfort. A single error, one bad mark, a slip, a moment's inattention means a goal. And a goal a deficit that my club might not be able to make up. So I bite my lip and curse every wasted shot, howl at every bevue and miscue, roar abuse at my midfielders when they give the ball away or my defenders when they ballwatch and loaf about while singing their praises and chanting ritual abuse at the visitors.

Strangely, that feeling of slippery desperation, of being right on the edge of some awful disaster, makes me feel more animated about giving what I can to help my club. If I can just sing that tiny bit much louder...if I can roar just that little bit sooner...if I wear my lucky old USL jersey...and my autographed Timbers Army scarf just so...maybe...just possibly...and we need that tiny bit of extra luck to win...

And that's nonsense, of course.

Nothing I do can or will change the outcome on the pitch one little bit. The players, the officials, the coaches...their efforts mean something. Everything I do, nothing I do, means anything to anyone but me.

Except...

As a group, as an Army...all of us, together...well...

Maybe we can.

At least, I like to think we can.

So does love - at least, the love of a soccer team - make me a Fool; "...folly at the most insensate stage." says the Tarot, and I cannot in good conscience disagree. But I can't regret my foolishness and it is too late to repent of it.

"Next time you see us, we may be smiling,
Green and Gold, Green and Gold, Green and Gold, Gold, Gold!
Maybe in prison, or on the TV,
We’ll say the Timbers brought us here!"

Soccer Saturday

The soccer infection seems to have spread.

Either that or we are becoming some sort of comic-book suburban family, because both my offspring have taken up kid soccer. Saturday I did nothing but soccer, kid or otherwise, it seemed.

Missy started us off in the morning with her little U-8 team playing on the football field down in Westmoreland Park in SE Portland. That's Little Miss wearing #4 in the photo above, by the way...

Most of the little ones don't really "play soccer". They run around chasing the ball; it's the worst sort of kiddie bunchball, for the most part. Missy's team was lucky to have Jazmine (wearing #12 in the snapshot above) who is not just four inches taller than the rest of the tinies but actually has some foot-eye coordination and some muscle memory skills.

Jazmine basically won the little one's first match; both the opposition (called, ridiculously, "Liverpool"...) and her own teammates were basically there to provide local color.

Pleasantly, neither Little Miss and her team nor her opponents seemed to care much about the game. They enjoyed the running around, and the cupcakes afterwards. Missy got in some good kicks and even provided Jazmine with an assist on one of her many goals.

My favorite part was the two teams turning the perfunctory post-match lineup-and-palmslap-good-game-Cheetahs! ritual into their own little vortex of kid energy, as they turned around and around four times giggling "good game Liverpool/Falconettes!" as they swirled and twirled.

The Boy's game was that afternoon and was an entirely more serious business.

Peep has decided he like playing in goal; he says he likes being the Last Line of Defense and being able to use his hands. Even giving up three goals in his half of play didn't seem to really discourage him. Good boy; I'd have been furious if I'd have shipped five goals in a half.

The afternoon was warm and lazy, and the sidelines were a Rockwellesque picture of soccer moms and dads, brothers, and sisters enjoying the day and uncritically applauding the play, good and bad.

Luckily for us we met a friend from Astor school and her daughter who shared Missy's love of all things My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, so the two little girls gleefully played ponies and thus whiled away the boring brother's game...

The Boy's team was rather handily thrashed, but this didn't seem to faze Number One Son, who hung around after ward to play kickabout with his pal (whose golazo was one of the few highlight for the "Cheetahs") and enjoyed the post-match chocolate shake-and-Burgerville-fries without a shade of remorse.

To top off the night I drove down to the Timbers match against Toronto FC. The team has been having a bad patch lately; injuries and suspensions have thinned an already-thin first XI and three meetings with first-place Real Salt Lake have resulted in three ugly defeats.

So going to a match lately has seemed less like "fun" and more like a chore; a disagreeable chore that has to be suffered through to help the team. As the troubles mount on the pitch it seems more critical to sing and chant and implore the Boys into the fight.

But it doesn't seem very enjoyable.

So it was an unanticipated pleasure to attend a match that exploded in a glorious cascade of Portland goals, four of them, and turned into a spontaneous party and outburst of happiness.

The tradition in Portland is that our lumberjack "mascot" Timber Joey saws off a slice of log for each goal and another for the keeper if he keeps a clean sheet.

As you can see, Saturday night's harvest was a pretty impressive pile of lumber.

Then - in keeping with the week I've been having - I had to drive out to Beaverton and do the recordkeeping for my workday Friday. It was early morning Sunday when I pulled up outside the darkened house to round out a day full of soccer with a sleep.