Portland Magazine
Athletics
Alumni
June 9, 2020
The University’s new baseball stadium will need to wait until next season for its premiere, so we’re taking this opportunity to look back on the blood, sweat, and puddle suckers that got us here.
LOCATED JUST OUTSIDE Howard Hall and facing Willamette Boulevard, University of Portland’s original baseball diamond was at best an acceptable playing field with ramshackle bleachers and little else, but it served as home to Pilots baseball for nearly six decades, from 1903 to the late 1950s. Plans for construction of Shipstad Hall placed the new dorm squarely in left field, and UP athletic director Al Negratti had the team move to a new diamond facing an open field where the Chiles Center stands now.
“It wasn’t much of a field,” Joe Etzel ’60 says now, “and the sun was always in everyone’s eyes. My first season coaching there in spring of 1966 we dropped a game to OSU because our center fielder lost a ball in the sun. I decided, ‘We’re not gonna lose another game to the sun,’ so we moved to where the field is now.”
The immediate problem Etzel faced was that there was no baseball field to move to. With tacit approval, no budget, and his players—including Tom Campbell ’69, Mike Mako ’77, and future Pilots head coach Terry Pollreisz ’69—the creation of a new Pilots baseball field from scratch became Etzel’s 1966 summer project.
“Bernie Harrington (’42) was on the athletic board, and I had coached his boys at Central Catholic,” Etzel recalls. “He was in the concrete business and donated his time to rough out the new field with a bulldozer. My players and I did the fine work with rakes and shovels and planted grass. We moved the bleachers and backstop from the old diamond and started from there.” Since the 1967 season, Pilots baseball has called that very same field home.
Improvements came gradually as Joe scrimped and saved and cajoled donations of materials, equipment, expertise, and good old-fashioned elbow grease. The first dugouts weren’t actually dug out; that came later when Jeff Heller ’79 was roped in to bring his family construction business’s backhoe and dig out proper three-step dugouts. Etzel drove a (loaned) dump truck to Mehling gulch and got rid of the dirt. “We’d work in the evening before it got dark,” Joe says now. “No budget and we got our hands dirty, but that’s how we got things done!”
Joe and his wife, Judy ’62, raised their family of four—Jim ’85, Kathy ’86, Susan ’90, and Tom ’96—on the Pilots field as well. Jim remembers digging sprinkler trenches by hand as a freshman in high school. “For ten consecutive summers I worked on that field,” he recalls fondly. “I still got calls from the physical plant when they couldn’t figure out where the pipes were! My brother, Tom, put in his high school and college summers too.” Depending on their ages the kids held a number of responsibilities during ball games. Toward the end of Joe’s 21-year coaching career, you’d find Jim at the mic in the announcer’s booth, Judy and Susan running concessions, Kathy in the ticket booth, and Tom serving as batboy. Tom went on to play for the Pilots too.
The maintenance department built a metal scoreboard and pitched in to cut the outfield grass, but it was up to the baseball team to care for the infield until artificial turf was installed prior to the 2015 season. “That’s just the way baseball is, though,” according to Joe. “Other schools didn’t have to build their own fields, but as far as dragging the infield, taking care of the mound and the plate, watering and mowing, it’s always fallen to coaches and players.” His son Jim points out, “UP players always went above and beyond when it came to maintaining that field. They took a lot of pride in the fact that it was known as the best collegiate baseball field in the northwest.”
Portland weather being what it is, Joe Etzel’s most unrelenting nemesis was rain. Nothing aggravated him more than games called on account of rain, and as always he was forced to get creative when it came to getting rid of standing water on his field. “I invented this thing we called the ‘Pilots Puddle Sucker,’” he says, laughing even now. “I got Roy Lehman in maintenance to weld a shop-vac onto an old 55-gallon drum and attached it to a hand truck. We’d roll it up to a puddle, suck up the water with a hose, and move on to the next puddle. I should have patented that thing. It was famous!”
The stadium that was recently demolished helped elevate the Pilots baseball program (that and the Pilots Puddle Sucker, of course). The 1,100-seat grandstand was built by Joe, his new head coach Terry Pollreisz, and Terry’s dad, of entirely donated materials save for the seats, and according to Joe and Jim, it was the first college baseball stadium with actual grandstands—not bleachers—in Oregon. Alumni and friends chipped in too—too many to name everyone, but Joe recalls Greg Dube ’88, Bryan Olden ’85, Glenn Hoffinger ’88, his son Jim, and many others swinging hammers during the off-season. “Once we built Pilot Stadium in 1987, it sparked a number of different facilities being built around the region. And it was the pride of our players that kept the thing going all those years.”
Jim still marvels at his dad’s prowess at securing donated building materials. “Ross Island Sand & Gravel donated a lot of concrete, thanks to my dad’s friendship with their dispatcher. At the end of the day, cement trucks always have leftovers, and they usually take it to a concrete dump. So they would drive to UP, and you might get a 10-by-10 patch or a 50-by-50 patch for free. My dad and Terry would drop everything and run over to do some concrete work.” Much of the wood was donated by Frank Lumber; Jim Frank ’71 played basketball and baseball for the Pilots.
The Etzels are realistic about the need to replace the stadium they built but can’t help feeling nostalgic now that it’s gone. “It was starting to have dry rot and that sort of thing,” Joe explains. “It served its purpose. But yeah, it was emotional. A lot of good things happened there.”
And what about the new stadium? “It was built thanks to donations, too,” Joe says. “We worked on it for a long time. Scott Leykam, the development crew, and many generous donors made it possible, since first making plans in 2012. My understanding is that the contractor will sign it over to UP on June 14, but then we’ll have to wait six or eight months for the next baseball season.” Joe allows himself a heavy sigh. “It’s just going to have to sit there all by itself.”
MARCUS COVERT ’93, ’97 is the associate editor of Portland magazine.
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