Background
Until 2010, the Beavers played in PGE Park and shared it with the Portland State Vikings college football team and the Portland Timbers soccer team, which played in the USL First Division, the second division of American soccer.
In 2009, the city of Portland was awarded a Major League Soccer (MLS) expansion franchise for 2011, also to be named the Portland Timbers. Due to MLS requirements about the playing surface, seating configuration, and scheduling, PGE Park was to be renovated as a soccer- and football-only stadium and a new stadium was to be built for the Beavers. Merritt Paulson, whose Shortstop LLC organization owned both the Timbers and the Beavers, estimated that a new baseball stadium with a capacity of 8,000 to 12,000 seats, along with the renovation of PGE Park for MLS, would cost about $85 million.
On February 3, 2010, the Portland City Council approved a $31 million agreement with Beavers' and Timbers' owner Merritt Paulson to renovate PGE Park, meaning that the Beavers had to find a new place to play their home games by 2011.
Read more about this topic: Portland Beavers Ballpark
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)