The Portland Diamond Project wants tobring pro baseball to Portland—but will it get the love and money needed to survive? by Abe Asher The Portland Diamond Project has been working to bring a Major League Baseball team to the Rose City for the better part of six years—taking meetings, selling merchandise, and, most importantly, trying to secure a site to build a new stadium.  Now, however, things may be changing. In September, the group announced it had signed a letter of intent to purchase Zidell Yards—a 33-acre former shipyard that has long sat vacant on the South Waterfront.  It is, in a number of ways, an ideal site. Zidell Yards is relatively centrally located, has strong transit connections to the rest of the city and beyond, and could become the nexus of a larger redevelopment of the south end of the city center.  In a press release announcing the letter of intent, Mayor Ted Wheeler said he believes the project is moving in the right direction.  “This is a big moment for Portland,” Wheeler said. “This is a tremendous opportunity to shape our waterfront, create new economic opportunities, and build a vibrant and sustainable neighborhood.” It’s not just Wheeler who is optimistic—the outgoing Portland City Council voted unanimously in favor of a resolution supporting the Portland Diamond Project’s efforts to land a team. Wheeler said the resolution signaled the city is “ready to make commitments.” Per its agreement with ZRZ Real Estate, a Zidell family business, Portland Diamond Project now has 42 months to complete its purchase of the property. That likely means it has just three-and-a-half years to convince Major League Baseball that it should expand to Portland—and, in tandem, to convince Portland that it needs an MLB team.  For baseball fans in Portland, it’s an easy sell. But for Portlanders wondering how the project may affect the city as a whole, it may be more complicated. Part of the reason why is that—Wheeler’s optimistic vision notwithstanding—professional sports teams rarely have the kind of impact we imagine.  “The basic story here is the economic impact of professional sports—or big events, like the Olympics—tend to be pretty small,” said Victor Matheson, a professor of economics at The College of the Holy Cross. “Which isn’t a problem, unless you’re talking about major public investment.” In the past, the push to bring baseball to Portland has included significant public investment. In 2002, when the city was attempting to lure the relocating Montreal Expos to the northwest, the state legislature passed a bill to allocate $150 million to stadium construction—which was, at the time, estimated to be nearly half of the total construction cost.  But that money was never used—the Expos moved to Washington, D.C.—and it’s unclear at this point how much public financing the Portland baseball group might seek. While Portland Diamond Project officials declined a request for an interview for this story, the group’s founder and president Craig Cheek wrote in an email to the Mercury that the group hopes to update the public on the state of the project soon.  For sports economists like Matheson, the question of whether it’s worth supporting the movement to bring an MLB team to Portland rests almost entirely on how much public money is involved.  “I’m fully in favor of Major League Baseball coming to Portland, while being simultaneously fully opposed to any sort of significant public funding for the sort of stadium infrastructure you’d need to host a Major League Baseball team,” Matheson said. “That pretty much sums up the basic opinion of any economist who has looked at the economic impact of sports in general.” There are a number of reasons why sports don’t have the kind of economic impact their boosters and allied politicians often predict they’ll have.  For one, much of the money spent in and around sports venues comes as part of what economists call the substitution effect: it’s not additional money that is being spent at a stadium, but rather money that would otherwise be spent elsewhere in the city.  In Portland, that could mean that some of the people currently spending money at Providence Park or the Moda Center, or at concerts or restaurants, might spend that money at a baseball stadium instead. Baseball’s effect on the city’s broader economic landscape, in that scenario, would be negligible.  “Sports are pretty good at shifting around money, they’re just not great at increasing total economic activity,” Matheson said.  Another issue with professional sports is that often a significant amount of the money spent on teams doesn’t stay in the city it’s spent in. Money spent on player salaries, for instance, may end up leaving Portland.  Taken as a whole, the economic data cuts against several elements of the Portland Diamond Project’s vision—including pledges to “create good jobs and new economic opportunities” and “provide a catalyst for workforce housing around the ballpark.” Of course, the impact of sports on a city cannot be fully measured in terms of their direct economic impact. Sports are also wellsprings of feeling, helping to create bonds between people and contributing to a city’s quality of life.  Economists, undaunted, have also attempted to measure the affective value of professional sports teams by asking people what dollar value they place on having a team in their town. Those studies have generally found that while the “quality of life” value of teams to residents is worth tens of millions of dollars, it’s still often worth less than the amount those teams are subsidized.  The question of subsidies for professional sports teams is made even more complicated by the fact that Major League Baseball owners are necessarily incredibly wealthy and that the league is an incredibly lucrative operation—raking in more than $11 billion in revenue last year.  Now, with the league reportedly considering expansion to 32 teams, Portland could potentially help it extend that record number further. Though the city has popular basketball and soccer teams, it remains one of the largest metro areas in the country with teams in just one of the traditional big four sports leagues—the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL. A team in Portland would also be a natural rival of the Seattle Mariners, who long ago proved the viability of baseball in the Northwest. Matheson said he thinks baseball would succeed in Portland, even if the on-field odds would be stacked against what would be a small market team in a league with effectively no salary cap restrictions.  Jules Boykoff, a professor of political science at Pacific University, said Portlanders should have an opportunity to weigh in directly on whether they want to see MLB in their city.  “I think there’d be one surefire way of finding out, which would be to have a public referendum — especially if the owners, who are wealthy… wish to have any public money put towards the project,” Boykoff said. “I think it would be job number one to make sure that it arrives on the ballot.” Boykoff said he’d be happy to see baseball in the city, but that, unlike social goods like housing, it cannot be construed as something Portland needs. “Portland needs Major League Baseball much less than Major League Baseball needs Portland,” Boykoff said. “I think Portland’s reputation is doing just fine without a baseball team.”