The New Enthusiast

August in the Rose City can sometimes feel like the eternal Sunday.  Poetess Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles once referred to Sunday as her “fun day” her “I don’t have to run day”.  Growing up Catholic and schoolgoing, Sundays always represented a curious mix of Hoffs’ fun and Woytek dread (not the name of my family’s dubstep group).  Along with the day off from school, there was homework, mass, going to bed early, my mother watching Masterpiece Theater (or was it theatre).  For a prepubescent boy (which I was until about 15), Sundays weren’t all funning and no running. My point being that there was always the inevitability of Monday on the horizon to kill some of the sheen of the weekend enthusiasm.

August takes on some of these qualities in Portland because the inevitability of drear and soppiness of the rainy season sometimes holds sway over the end of summer.  While my blogmates here at the New Enthusiast have moved or are moving on to better things including wives, prestigious lawyering schools, or writing well received arty things on baseball nerdbone websites, one is left to wonder about the sporting life right here in Portland OR.

As I have taken the assignment of co-covering a Portland Beavers v. Iowa Cubs AAA baseball game later in the week for the Portland Sportsman I can not help but to project some of these lingering  feelings onto some of the forgottens still playing AAA baseball this time of year.

Having attended some 15 professional baseball games at different levels this year(from independent league to MLB) it seems as though this upcoming late August AAA game represents fully this Sunday evening feeling.  The metaphorical Monday being another season of players not realizing their goals of making The Show.  The Portland Beavers roster in particular, being an affiliate of the lowly San Diego Padres, has been raided of nearly all their top prospects.  What is left are some older, more marginal prospects, roster fillers and journeymen.

This is the inevitable nature of AAA baseball especially late in the year when the parent club is no longer competing for a pennant. The Kyle Blanks’s, Cesar Carillo’s, Everth Cabrera’s and Will Venable’s of the organization have been called up with varying degrees of success.  Watching these kinda guys represent the excitement of watching minor league, especially AAA baseball.  Without them, the enthusiasm can be hard to muster.  Luckily for some of the remaining Beavers, roster expansion happens in two short weeks.  The cups of coffee will be dispersed and some of the current Beavers will get a taste of the MLB good life, if potentially only for a month.