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.

 

Extinct Beavers

The Portland Beavers professional baseball team played their last game of the season today.Now that's not particularly interesting, really. One form of "Beavers" or another have had a closing day in some part of Portland or other since the early years of the 20th Century. So the last ballgame of the season shouldn't be a big deal.

And especially for these Portland Beavers. AAA affiliate of the San Diego Padres, the 2010 edition of the team sucked about the usual amount of pipe that a post-2000 Beavers squad was expected to; they lost 85 games and finished 15 and a half games behind Tacoma in the PCL-North. This is no fluke for the Bevos - over the past decade the team has won the PCL-North exactly once, in 2004. It had never won the league. Ever.Before this season's opener a total of 353 field players - an average of 39 players a year - have suited up for the team at least once...and that's not counting pitchers. I recall reading that the 2009 squad used something like 68 or 69 players. That's not a baseball team, that's a freaking food riot in Karachi.

Ridiculous.

Over the past six season the Portland baseball club has never had a winning season, losing a total of 476 games over that time. In fact, the club has had only two winning seasons since the resumption of AAA baseball in Portland in 2001, and one of these, 2002, was a "winning" season by a margin of a single game.

As a Padres farm the Beavers sucked. Their hitting sucked, their fielding sucked, their pitching sucked. They were sucky to all fields. They sucked at home and on the road.

And, worse than the overall suckiness, their suckitude didn't even count for anything.Minor league baseball is a joke, a sham. Even given that professional sports are a silly thing in general (although certainly not all that much sillier than much of what humans fiddle their time away with) minor league baseball is an especially vile mockery, a jape for the teams to pretend to play a season's campaign, a ridiculous and meaningless waste of time and money for the spectator to view.

For the simple reason that the minor leagues, most of them, from the tiniest Rookie League outpost to the mightiest of Triple-A franchises, are chattel, sockpuppets, slaves to the major league teams that own them.

The Beavers' entire reason for being is to cook the meat served in San Diego. The only reality that matters on the field in Portland is the individual stats of the players, their hopes of getting the callup to the Show, the managers and coaches daily vigil to see who has the Right Stuff.Wins? Losses? Pennant races?

Who cares.

The point of the Portland Beavers, from the middle Fifties until this afternoon, was to raise players for the Bigs. Not to win diddly-squat.

Not surprisingly, the response to this sham was underwhelming. At the death of professional baseball in Portland for the fourth time* the total number of season ticket holders for the Beavers was 150.

One hundred fifty. That's right. Fewer than show up to a typical high school baseball game, barely enough to support a kid's football club.Going to a typical Beaver's game was like going to a wake in a public park. The huge old barn of Civic Stadium was virtually silent to the point where you could hear the pop of even the curveballs and sliders into the catcher's mitt and the barking of the vendors sounded lost and echoing amid the emptiness. The fans voted with their butts about this mockery, choosing to stay away in droves. The article about the club's finale noted that in nine years the place sold out thrice: the opener in 2001, the final game, and some fireworks display in 2004.

Three sellouts.In nine years.

And yet when the old rodent finally croaked the usual suspects were out kicking dirt on the city father's shoes. Oh, dear, but the mayor and his cronies didn't do enough. Oh, the lack of vision! Oh, the failure and the weeping! Oh, for the lost glories of the bat and ball! Can you still hold you head up, Portlandia, having lost the castorine jewel in your crown?Hogwash. Horsepuckey. Nonsense.

Baseball has left, again, because the minor leagues are a bad joke.

For the same reason that nobody goes to the racetrack to see the horses warm up, nobody pays to see a couple of nameless kids scuffle in an alley. Because the team had no real stars, no permanent players to care about, because nothing that happened today mattered next week or next month. Because there was no team, no core, no living thing, but just an empty uniform filled with faceless names that moved on before we could care.

I used to love baseball. When I lived in Chicago I followed the Cubs, in Philadelphia, the Phillies. I cared about the games, knew the players, the teams, the stats. I was a typical baseball fan and you don't want to hear about it.

But moving to Portland opened my eyes to what the rest of the country gets for "baseball". It's a sad, tattered zombie, staggering along on the fumes of the game's past and the lingering affection of an older generation. The very fact that it survives as paying entertainment says a lot about willingness of baseball fans to accept any dross rather than face the reality that their proud city is nothing but a meat locker for someplace else far away.

The major leagues killed the minors. I'd rather see nothing at all than the bitter mockery that the minors have made of the game.

So go, Beavers. In your present sickly state, who needs you?

Come back if you plan to play for keeps.

Otherwise?

Forget it.* Note: The original Portland baseball club was formed in 1901 in the then Northwest League. It merged with the nascent Pacific Coast League in 1903 but folded 14 years later; that was #1. Another "Beavers" club was formed in 1919. That organization played through the glory years of the PCL, from the Ragtime Era until the Dodgers and Giants moved west in the mid-Fifties. That team, by 1972 a Dodgers farm, moved that year to Spokane and eventually to Las Vegas. That's #2. The third try was a AAA club formed in 1978, first as a Phillies farm and then as a Minnesota affiliate. It left for Salt Lake City in 1993. That's #3. Mind you, this doesn't count the small fry like the Single-A Portland Mavericks (1973-77) or the Single-A Rockies (1995-2000). So now the latest dead Beaver is #4. Sic transit gloria castori.