Hillsboro Hops Pay Tribute To Local History

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Hank Stern, GoLocalPDX Contributor

Kudos to the Hillsboro Hops for paying homage tonight to a colorful chapter in local baseball lore.

That chapter came and went from 1973-1977 during a break in the city’s stints as home to the Triple-A Portland Beavers in the Pacific Coast League, when the Portland Mavericks stormed through the Class A Northwest League for a five-year stretch.

Of course, now there’s not even a minor league baseball team in Portland, a city with more than 600,000 residents. But that’s another story, and an ugly one at that.

Let’s focus instead on the happier Mavericks memories that the Hops are smart enough to use as the prompt for a home-game promotion at Ron Tonkin Field on Thursday, Aug. 20.

For those of you lucky enough – and yes, old enough – to remember the Mavericks, we can tell you with full confidence that about the only thing that franchise shared with current-day minor league franchises in Oregon like the Hops, the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes and the Eugene Emeralds was that all played in the short-season, 60-year-old Northwest League.

Spectators enjoy today’s NWL games in fan-friendly stadiums from mid-June through early September complete with bouncy houses for the kids and tasty IPAs for the adults. Rosters are populated by young players often with their best days ahead of them in their respective organizations.

The Mavericks were a very, very different animal.

The franchise owned by actor Bing Russell was famously unaffiliated with any major league organization. Most of the Mavericks had the words "young prospects” fully in their rear view mirrors. And their home park of Portland’s Civic Stadium was to put it politely, a dump where fans recall the hot dogs being colder than the beer and a semi-drunken guy known as “Captain Baseball” roamed the stands as entertainment.

And yet the Mavericks captured a good chunk of the city’s imagination with gaudy red-and-black uniforms, 10-cent beer nights where empty cups were stacked so high they swayed in the summer winds and an eclectic collection of players that included oddities such as left-handed catcher Jim Swanson to used-to-be’s like former big-league pitcher Jim Bouton of “Ball Four” fame.

For those of you too young or too new to Portland to remember the Mavericks, the team’s all-too-short run in Portland was captured beautifully in the 2014 documentary "Battered Bastards of Baseball."

Hops executive vice president and general manager K.L. Wombacher said the Hops got the idea for the Aug. 20 promotion after that documentary came out last year.

The Hops will be wearing throwback Mavericks uniforms and honoring more than a dozen former Mavs including acclaimed author Larry Colton, manager Frank Peters and pitcher Rob Nelson (full disclosure: I am lucky enough to call Nelson a friend) who came up with the idea for “Big League Chew” while in the Mavericks bullpen.

The takeaway from all this should not be some gauzy memory pining for the way baseball “the way it used to be.”

The Mavericks drew decent crowds in part because they played in an era before cable sports competed for fans’ eyeballs and when local sports media actually covered the games like they mattered.

But they also attracted fans because they made it fun to go to the ballpark on a warm summer night.

That’s not some secret sauce. The Hops, Volcanoes and Emeralds all shoot for – and achieve -- the same basic premise of making the game fun for spectators, albeit in a much more family-friendly way than the Mavericks ever did.

And speaking of fun, one final note here: If a pre-screening soiree at Southpark downtown before last summer’s one-night showing in Portland of “Battered Bastards of Baseball” is any indication of how time has failed to dull ex-Mavericks’ penchant for partying, I suggest the Hops have plenty of beer, wine and booze stocked tonight at Ron Tonkin Field.

A native Oregonian, Hank Stern had a 24-year career in journalism, working for more than a decade as a reporter with The Associated Press in Oregon, New Jersey and Washington, DC. He worked seven years for The Oregonian as a reporter in east Multnomah County, Washington County and Portland’s City Hall. In 2005, he became Willamette Week’s managing news editor and worked there until 2011.

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