Hipster Culture Drives Beavers Out of Portland

The Portland Beavers are one of minor league baseball's longest-tenured teams: between four stints starting in 1906, the team has played almost 100 seasons in the Rose City. The most recent run ended in September, 2010, when the Beavers played their last game at PGE Park before stadium renovations began in preparation for the incoming Major League Soccer team, the Portland Timbers.

So the Beavers lost their home and were scooped up by Jeff Moorad, lead owner of the San Diego Padres (to whom the Beavers are affiliated), and promptly moved out of Oregon. The stadium (or lack thereof) has commonly been cited as the primary impetus for the move. But Bottom of the Fourth has uncovered new evidence revealing the falsity of that statement.

No, the Beavers were taken from the good people of Portland not because of any stadium issue, but because of that scourge of 2010s society: the hipster.

A casual fan cannot have been expected to make this deduction on their own, of course. Many of the details of this hipster-based internal sabotage of the team were shuttered away, with the intent of never seeing the light of day.

And oh yes, it was sabotage. There isn't any doubt about that. It had to have taken an extremely organized and well-connected network of conspirators to so thoroughly dismantle this team from the inside out. They permeated every facet of the organization, from concessions to marketing, even to bullpen catchers.

For instance, did you know that for the entirety of the 2010 season the team was put on an organic wheatgrass and quinoa-based diet? While healthy, the players hated it, and secretly formed a food-trafficking black market with stadium vendors. Of course, we all know what kind of food is available at ballparks; by the end of the season the entire team was 20 pounds overweight. Was it the syndicate's plan all along? It seems likely.

The Beavers were forced to wear hipster glasses, much to the detriment of their vision

And while it's never fun to be the away team, the Beavers were always the away team. Hipsters, as we know, love irony above all else, and the hipster concentration of Portland being what it is, fans took to "cheering" for the opposition. Of course, while they (the fans) would claim good intent, that doesn't hold much water with the players, who had to step up to bat to jeers and yells of "you are the peorest lol!" on a regular basis.

Another driving factor in the team's move was the degradation of PGE Park. While many would attribute this to natural wear-and-tear and view the current renovation as addressing these issues, this is merely a clever ruse by the colluders. The stadium was intentionally tampered with; over the last several years, all stadium mechanisms were converted to "fixed-gear", a notably inefficient design. A lack of maintenance has resulted in an untenable situation - complete renovation was really the only option.

The parties responsible for this sabotage have concealed themselves well, and Bottom of the Fourth is still following several leads. The team's new ownership group (led by Jeff Moorad), The Portland Chapter of Hipsters United, and Beavers America are all groups with clear reasons for wanting the Beavers out of Portland - respectively, moving the Padres' AAA team closer to home, irony, and dissatisfaction with the sullying of the beaver name by applying it to lowly humans - but none have been proven to be connected as of yet.