Baseball and Softball
The Portland Beavers were a Triple-A baseball team from the Pacific Coast League affiliated with the San Diego Padres. The most recent franchise, which left after the 2010 season to become the Tucson Padres, was founded in 2001, though the Beavers name dates to an early Portland baseball team established in 1903. With the Beavers no longer playing in Portland, the closest minor league team were the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes, located 43 miles away in Keizer until the Hillsboro Hops begin play in 2013 at a new 4,500-seat stadium in Hillsboro, a Portland suburb.
Baseball teams called the Beavers existed in Portland from 1903-1917 and again from 1919-1972, and finally from 1978-1993. In 1973, after the Beavers moved to Spokane, Washington, the Portland Mavericks came to town in the form of an independent Single-A team within the Northwest League. From 1973 to 1977 they played in what was then known as Civic Stadium. The Mavericks were owned by ex-minor league player and television actor Bing Russell. When Russell sold the team back to the Beavers in 1978 it was for 116,000 dollars, at the time a record amount for a minor league franchise. The most recent Beavers franchise played in PGE Park. The original Beavers stadium was Vaughn Street Park located in northwest Portland. The Beavers have won the Pacific Coast League Pennant the following years: 1906, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1932, 1936, 1945 and 1983. When the Beavers relocated to Salt Lake City in 1993, another Northwest League team, the Portland Rockies, moved in for the 1995 season, playing until 2000. When the Beavers returned, the Rockies relocated to Pasco, Washington to become the Tri-City Dust Devils.
There has been recent interest in attracting a Major League Baseball franchise to Portland. In 2004, the city made an unsuccessful bid for the Montreal Expos, and in 2006 the city was contacted by the Florida Marlins.
The local Alpenrose Dairy is host to the annual Little League softball World Series and has a velodrome on site.
Read more about this topic: Sports In Portland, Oregon
Famous quotes containing the words baseball and and/or baseball:
“It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)
“One of the baseball-team owners approached me and said: “If you become baseball commissioner, you’re going to have to deal with 28 big egos,” and I said, “For me, that’s a 72% reduction.””
—George Mitchell (b. 1933)