Pro Baseball? Here?

More powerful than the baseball bat might be the pencil. If moving the Portland Beavers to Vancouver pencils out, why not give it a try?

Of course, that’s a mighty big “if,” but apparently one that Mayor-elect Tim Leavitt is willing to explore. As Cami Joner reported in Thursday’s Columbian, Leavitt believes, “Baseball in Vancouver presents a significant opportunity to the community,” and the Triple A (one level below Major League Baseball) Portland Beavers are looking for a new home. Team owner Merritt Paulson has decided to move the team from PGE Park, where the Major League Soccer Portland Timbers are taking over. Plans to replace Memorial Coliseum in Portland with a baseball park have fizzled, as have Paulson’s efforts to move the team to Beaverton or to Portland’s Lents neighborhood.

So now Paulson is considering a move across the Columbia River, and Leavitt is listening. There are three ways to view the notion of pro baseball coming to Vancouver:

No. Period.

Only if no public money is used.

Perhaps with public funding, but only if a powerful economic benefit is accurately projected.

We like the third view, accompanied by a believe-it-when-we-see-it caveat. It could be that 70-plus baseball games a year played by a team that averaged 5,000-plus fans per game this year could pump plenty of big bucks into this local economy. There’s nothing wrong with Leavitt studying that possibility, but three factors immediately conspire against him: Local government budgets are cash-strapped like never before, there’s no imminent sign that a robust local economy is on or near the horizon, and if and when that recovery ever arrives, it’s doubtful that Paulson can wait that long.

While the community waits to see if the pencil is as powerful as the baseball bat, it helps to remember that the necessary interest in minor league baseball exists in the Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton Metropolitan Statistical Area (combined population of about 2.2 million). In addition to averaging 5,000 fans per baseball game this year, PGE Park, which seats about 18,000 fans, sold out for the Triple A All-Star Game in July. In fact, there’s about a century of pro baseball history in Portland.

For comparison purposes, one of the more successful Triple A baseball operations is in Round Rock, Texas, where the Express is a farm club of the Houston Astros. With 104,000 residents, Round Rock is smaller than Vancouver (about 160,000, with 400,000-plus in Clark County) but is part of the Austin metropolitan area, population about 1.5 million.

Where might be the best place to accommodate the Beavers on this side of the river? That probably would be in the Clark College area or nearby Hudson’s Bay High School, site of the 1,000-seat Propstra Stadium. More remote sites such as around the Amphitheater at Clark County would discourage commutes by Portland’s sizeable baseball fan base.

Last week’s revival of baseball interest in Vancouver stirred new life into a similar effort launched in 2004 by Arch Miller, founder of Southwest Washington Friends of Baseball (www.swwbaseball.org). “We would absolutely be in favor of it. But for Triple A, you need a stadium in the 5,000-7,000-seat range,” Miller said last week.

You also need a local government that’s not cash-strapped, and you need a viable business plan that promises meaningful boosts to the local economy. We suspect that, before all of that falls into place, the Chicago Cubs might win the World Series.