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    Can Minor League Baseball Survive Its Real Estate Problems?

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    Ed Willson has a jar filled with dirt sitting on his desk.For more than 40 years, Mr. Willson has been a fan of the minor league baseball team in Eugene, Ore., the Emeralds, and a season-ticket holder for 22 seasons. He was crushed when Civic Stadium, the longtime home of the team, burned to the ground in 2015. “It was a serious heartbreak,” Mr. Willson said.After the fire, Mr. Willson made a pilgrimage to the scorched diamond, where he filled a plastic bag with dirt from the pitcher’s mound that he considered sacred. He planned to give it to the team when it began construction on its new stadium.Nine years later, the dirt is still on Mr. Willson’s desk. The Emeralds are still without a permanent home. And there’s a risk that the team, after 69 seasons, may leave town altogether.Although the Emeralds (also known for their Sasquatch mascot, Sluggo) have survived wildfires, losing seasons, recessions, Major League Baseball’s 2020 reorganization of the minor leagues and Covid, they are a team without a ballpark.And the debate about the Emeralds’ fate — in the birthplace of Nike, no less — is a testament to the struggle for affordable, in-person sports to survive in the current Gilded Age.Nor are the Emeralds the only minor league baseball team that has reached a crisis point as a result of a ballpark problem. In 2020, Major League Baseball imposed new guidelines for its minor league stadiums. They include LED lighting, changing rooms for women, new fencing, expanded training facilities and a larger clubhouse. Those fixes are pricey.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Eugene Weekly Will Resume Printing After Embezzlement Discovery

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      The Eugene Weekly was forced to lay off all 10 of its staff members last month after it discovered tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills.A weekly newspaper in Oregon that laid off all of its workers in December after an employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars will resume its print edition on Feb. 8 after raising enough money through donations, its editor said on Sunday.The newspaper, The Eugene Weekly, abruptly stopped printing after it discovered financial problems, including money not being paid into employee retirement accounts and $70,000 in unpaid bills to the newspaper’s printer, leading it to lay off all 10 of its staff members just days before Christmas, its editor, Camilla Mortensen, said at the time.Over the past month, however, Ms. Mortensen has continued publishing articles online with the help of interns, freelancers and retired reporters and editors — many of whom were willing to work without pay to keep the paper afloat — she said on Sunday.As of this week, Ms. Mortensen and three other staff members will be brought back onto the payroll in preparation for the Feb. 8 edition, she said, noting that the return to print was made possible by readers and members of the public who raised at least $150,000 after the financial problems were reported.“With all this support from people, there’s just no way we can’t try — we have to try printing,” Ms. Mortensen said.The theft, leaders of the newspaper said in a Dec. 28 letter to readers, had been hidden for years and left its finances “in shambles.” The paper has hired a forensic accountant to investigate.Leaders of the paper said that while the situation was unprecedented, they believed in the newspaper’s mission, and were “determined to keep EW alive.”The Eugene Police Department could not be immediately reached on Sunday evening for comment about the embezzlement but said previously that it was investigating. The now-former employee accused of stealing, who was involved in the newspaper’s finances, has not been publicly identified.The free paper, founded in 1982, previously printed 30,000 copies each week. Copies could be found in bright red boxes in and around Eugene, Oregon’s third-largest city.Ms. Mortensen, who became editor in 2016 after nearly a decade at the paper, said Sunday that the closure had been painful.“Every time I walk by one of our little red boxes, there’s no paper in it, it stabs me in the heart,” she said, noting that the plan was to print 5,000 fewer copies so that the paper could remain sustainable.“Obviously, this outpouring has been amazing,” she said, “but we also want to go back to being this free weekly paper that pays for itself.” More

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      Letters With Suspicious Substances Sent to Election Offices Spur Alarm

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      Letters, some apparently containing fentanyl or other substances, were sent to local election offices in Georgia, Oregon and Washington State.Local election offices in at least three states were sent letters containing fentanyl or other suspicious-looking substances, the authorities said on Thursday. The letters come at a time when election offices are seeing a growing array of threats and aggressive behavior that has followed baseless charges of election fraud in recent years.The letters targeted election offices in Fulton County, Ga., which includes much of Atlanta; Lane County, Ore., which includes Eugene; and King, Spokane, Pierce and Skagit Counties in Washington. At least two of the mailings were reported to include messages, but beyond an apparent call to stop the election sent to the Pierce County Elections office in Tacoma, their nature was unclear.The Pierce County mailing included a white powder later identified as baking soda. A preliminary analysis of letters sent to King and Spokane Counties in Washington identified the presence of fentanyl, law enforcement authorities said. The letter sent to Fulton County was identified and flagged as a possible threat but had not yet been delivered, said Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state.Fentanyl can be fatal if ingested even in small doses, but in general, experts say, skin contact such as might occur when opening a letter poses little risk. None of the affected election offices reported injuries to employees.The F.B.I. and the U.S. Postal Service are investigating the letters, most of which arrived in Wednesday’s mail. In Washington State, they arrived only days after at least two synagogues in Seattle, the largest city in King County, received packages containing white crystalline or powdery substances.Officials in the affected states called the mailings threats to the democratic process. Mr. Raffensperger called on candidates for political office to denounce them.“This is domestic terrorism and needs to be condemned by anyone who holds elected office and wants to hold elected office,” he said. “If they don’t condemn this, then they’re not worthy of the office they’re running for.” He said his own son died five and a half years ago of a fentanyl overdose.While the mailings drew national attention, intimidation and threats of violence against election officials have become commonplace since former President Donald J. Trump and other Republican officeholders began raising baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.The Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections, singled out early by Mr. Trump and others claiming fraud, has been a frequent target, but hardly the only one. It was not clear whether the mailing to Atlanta had any connection to the racketeering trial playing out in Fulton County court. But election offices nationwide have tightened security, screening visitors and sometimes even installing bulletproof glass, in recent years.Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, said on Thursday that she had received more than 60 death threats since she was named as a defendant in September in a lawsuit challenging Mr. Trump’s right to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot. Threats against officials statewide are common enough that her office has established a process for detecting them.“We’re seeing a high threat environment toward election workers,” said Ms. Griswold, a Democrat. In Oregon, “the very charged interactions with patrons, voting or not, the aggressive pursuits of staff — we’re starting to see that here as well,” said Devon Ashbridge, the spokeswoman for the Lane County Elections office. “This has been a frankly frightening situation.”Nationally, the tide of threatening behavior toward election workers is a factor in the growing number of people leaving the profession and the difficulty in recruiting replacements.“We do see trends in retirements, but this is on a much grander scale than we’ve ever seen before,” said Tammy Patrick, the chief executive officer for programs at the National Association of Election Officials.The Justice Department has filed criminal charges involving election-related threats against at least 14 people since it formed a task force on the issue in June 2021. Ms. Griswold and others say, however, that both the federal and state responses have fallen short of what is needed.And they say they worry that the supercharged atmosphere surrounding the coming presidential election will only make matters worse.Election workers are “our neighbors, our grandparents, Republicans, Democrats together,” Ms. Griswold said. “They didn’t sign up for a really hostile environment for participating in American democracy.” More