Merritt’s system

BACK STORY • Timbers and Beavers owner, Merritt Paulson, has big-league ambitions

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, Mar 18, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (8 Reader comments)

The former senior director of marketing and business development for NBA Entertainment, Merritt Paulson made the move from New York to Portland when his company, Shortstop LLC, bought the Timbers soccer and Beavers baseball teams last year, making him the teams’ fourth owner since 2001.

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTOS

He’s in the middle of an empty PGE Park. Standing on the new FieldTurf, in dress pants and an open-collared dress shirt.

He’s bouncing a soccer ball on his knee for a photographer. Promising, as the camera clicks, that he’ll keep it going longer this time.

And then he does, bouncing the ball a dozen or more times on one knee, then the other. Until all the shots are taken.

Then, 35-year-old Merritt Paulson – lean and lanky and looking, well, all of 31 or 32 – moves on to his next bit of work.

Like: Explaining why nine months ago he spent what was reportedly $16 million on two minor league Portland sports franchises. Spent the money on Portland, really.

And the potential of its sports future.

Last May, Paulson announced that his company, Shortstop LLC, had bought the Portland Timbers soccer team and the Triple-A Portland Beavers from a group headed by a Sacramento, Calif., businessman that had owned the teams less than a year. The sale was finalized in June.

Paulson’s purchase made him the fourth owner of the teams since 2001.

But his purchase just might give the teams some stability. It definitely has given Portland something it hasn’t seen in a while: a real-life hometown sports-team owner.

Paulson – the son of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr., who’s a minority investor in his son’s company – left his job in New York as senior director of marketing and business development for NBA Entertainment to buy the teams.

His wife, Heather, a Harvard Law School graduate, left her job as a New York hedge fund investor and now works for Nike Inc.

They bought a house – their first – in Lake Oswego. Paulson has since spent 12- to 16-hour days at his office at PGE Park, marketing the teams, talking about changes, and about big dreams.

He says he sees him and his wife staying in Portland for quite a while.

“This is not a short-term thing,” he says.

Bevo attendance needs boost

“The teams were moving solidly in the right direction,” he says, sitting in his office suite above the PGE Park field and referring to the ownership group he bought the team from – led by California businessman Abe Alizadeh. “Now, it’s just a question of investing in the long term.”

The teams are hardly without their troubles – the Beavers especially.

Featuring players who are one step away from suiting up for major league baseball’s San Diego Padres, the Beavers last year drew fewer than 5,500 fans a game – in the largest market in all of minor league baseball.

It actually was a few hundred per game less than the year before, when the Beavers were ranked 10th out of 16 Pacific Coast League teams in attendance.

Still, so far, more than a few Portland sports watchers seem to like Paulson’s attitude. And what he could mean for Portland sports.

“I’m very impressed,” says Lynn Lashbrook, a sports management consultant who led a campaign several years ago to bring major league baseball to Portland. “What we’ve never had locally, even with the Blazers, is the resourceful local owner who has a vision. That’s always been a vacuum – not having the local ownership and leadership.

“We’re starting over with the piece that was missing all along.”

Marketing made a mission

Paulson seems to agree – at least about what local and involved ownership can mean for the Beavers and Timbers.

“The Beavers and Timbers … this is one of the best markets there is,” he says. But the teams need to be marketed better, he says. They need to sell season tickets in a more creative way, giving season ticket holders a chance to take batting practice with the Beavers, for instance, or scrimmage with the Timbers.

And both teams need to be more involved in the community.

“A lot of it is just about doing the right things in the community – sports ownership fundamentals,” Paulson says. “It’s not rocket science.”

Paulson’s purchase – with the assumed resources of his company, and his relatively young age – has spurred people to talk about bigger things for Portland as well.

It’s a conversation that Paulson sometimes participates in.

Some wonder whether he might someday play a part in bringing major league baseball to Portland, for instance.

Paulson doesn’t reject the idea entirely, but does say Portland is not yet ready for the big leagues – not in terms of the amount of built-in revenue a major league owner needs to get from a community’s large corporations.

“Could I be interested, in the right time and the right place for the opportunity? Sure,” Paulson says.

But, he says, “major league baseball needs a lot more private sector support than currently exists (in Portland). It needs to have a bigger corporate presence. It’s not about population. It’s about what type of business infrastructure (a city has). The costs associated with major league baseball … are just radically different.”

Soccer’s a different story

Paulson is more immediately enthusiastic about bringing Portland into the major leagues in another area – Major League Soccer.

The Timbers are in the First Division of the United Soccer League, one rung below the top professional soccer league – Major League Soccer, which has West Coast franchises in places such as Los Angeles; San Jose, Calif.; and Salt Lake City.

While Portland just lost out to Seattle for a recent MLS expansion site, MLS officials have indicated there will be other expansion franchises likely granted for 2011 or 2012. Portland could be a top contender for one of them.

Paulson is enthusiastically pursuing owning that team, and having it play in PGE Park.

“This is a unique soccer market, pure and simple,” Paulson says. “Arguably among the very best soccer markets in the United States.”

That’s evident not only in how the Timbers draw – they averaged more than 6,800 fans per game in their 14 home games last year, including almost 16,000 in their last regular season game against Charleston – but also in other intangibles, like the health of youth leagues throughout the metropolitan area, Paulson says.

“There are MLS teams that exist today that would die to have the Portland soccer market,” he says.

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