Portland Rockies

Northwest League (1995-2000)

Tombstone

Born: September 14, 1994 – The Bend Rockies relocate to Portland, OR¹
Moved: 2001 (Tri-Cities Dust Devils)

First Game: June 15, 1995 (W 3-2 vs. Eugene Emeralds)
Last Game: September 6, 2000 (L 3-0 @ Eugene Emeralds)

Northwest League Champions: 1997

Stadium

Civic Stadium (23,150)²

Dimensions (1996): Left: 309′, Center: 407′, Right: 325′

Ownership & Affiliation

Owners:

1995 – 2000: Jack Cain & Mary Cain
2000: Portland Family Entertainment (Marshall Glickman, Peter Stott, Scott Thomason, Mark Gardiner, Peter Jacobsen, Bob Miller, Jay Zidell, Hank Ashforth, John Von Schlegell, et al.)

Major League Affiliation: Colorado Rockies

Attendance

The Portland Rockies’ opening night attendance of 19,658 fans on June 15th, 1995 set a new Northwest League single game attendance record, shattering the previous mark of 10,208 set by the Spokane Indians on August 1st, 1986. The Civic Stadium crowd outnumbered that of seven Major League games played on the same evening, including the Pacific Northwest’s own Seattle Mariners (12,585 at the Kingdome).³

The Rockies’ total attendance for the 1995 season (249,696) also obliterated the Northwest League’s single season record of 156,950 established by the Boise Hawks just a year earlier. The Portland Rockies would beat their own record the next year, drawing 249,995 fans for the 1996 season.

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Source: The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball (3rd ed.), Lloyd Johnson & Miles Wolff, 2007. Pages 660-690.

Background

The Portland Rockies were a popular Northwest League farm club of the National League’s Colorado Rockies for six summers between 1995 and 2000. The franchise previously operated as the Bend Rockies from 1992 through 1994.

At the conclusion of the 1993 season, the Class AAA Portland Beavers of the Pacific Coast League (PCL) left town for Salt Lake City. Portland was a classic triple-A size market, but when no new PCL franchise materialized within the next year, Bend Rockies Jack Cain swooped in with his Class A club in September of 1994. Cain was a Portland native who grew up watching the original Beavers play at Civic Stadium. He was also a veteran Northwest League operator who, along with his wife Mary, had run the Bend franchise for 14 seasons since buying the team for $63,000 in 1981.⁴

The Rockies were an immediate hit in Portland during the summer of 1995. The team’s opening night crowd of 19,658 shattered the Northwest League’s single-game attendance record. For the 1995 season, Portland drew 249,696 fans, obliterating the league’s previous full-season record of 156,950 fans set by the Boise Hawks just a year earlier. The Rockies would re-establish the total season attendance record again in 1996 with 249,995 fans through the Civic Stadium turnstiles.

In Competition

The Portland Rockies won the 1997 Northwest League championship, besting the Boise Hawks 3 games to 2 in a best-of-five playoff series. The Rockies returned to the championship series in 1999 as well, but were swept by the Spokane Indians in three games.

Notable future Major League stars to come through Portland during the Rockies era included:

Pitcher Jake Westbrook (Rockies ’96)
Shortstop Chone Figgins (Rockies ’98)
Outfielder Juan Pierre (Rockies ’98)
Outfielder Brad Hawpe (Rockies ’00)

Pitcher Jason Jennings, who made two appearances for Portland in 1999, won the National League’s Rookie of the Year Award with Colorado in 2002.

Infielder Clint Barmes (Rockies ’00) was the last active Portland Rockies player in professional baseball, appearing in his final Major League game with the San Diego Padres in October 2015.

Back To The Beavers

In August 1999, an investor group named Portland Family Entertainment (PFE) announced an agreement in principle to purchase the Pacific Coast League’s Calgary Cannons and move the team to Portland in 2001. Though Cannons owner Russ Parker would back out of the deal at the last moment, the die was set for the return of triple-A baseball to the Rose City. PFE soon struck a new deal to purchase the Albuquerque Dukes instead. The resulting transactions saw PFE pay a rights fee to obtain the market rights to Portland from the Northwest League and purchase the Rockies franchise from Jack & Mary Cain, with the intent of relocating the Northwest League franchise to a smaller Pacific Northwest community.

The Rockies would end up playing their final season at Civic Stadium in 2000 as lame ducks. Everyone knew that the Pacific Coast League was coming back in 2001 and that the Rockies would move to Pasco, Washington for the 2001 season. The official handover from the Cains to Portland Family Entertainment happened midway through the season and the Rockies played their final game that September.

The former Portland Rockies franchise still plays in the Northwest League today as the Pasco-based Tri City Dust Devils. The return of triple-A baseball to Portland, played once again under the traditional “Beavers” name, turned out to be something of a fiasco. The Beavers cycled through multiple owners and managers before leaving town again in 2010. Civic Stadium was remodeled as a soccer-specific stadium in 2011 and is now home to the Portland Timbers of Major League Soccer and the Portland Thorns of the National Women’s Soccer League. But Portland has now gone without professional baseball for over a decade, the Rose City’s longest baseball drought since the 19th century.