Count me among the Portland cynics. Portland's history with baseball is pretty bad: very very recently, they didn't even have a minor-league team. Now they have a short-season single A team, the Hillsboro Hops, and their single-A team has lower attendance than the teams in Vancouver and Spokane.
Austin could work. The demographics are right, and the city is loaded with cash. Need corporate sponsors to buy a ton of luxury boxes? Austin has that down. And the "can Texas have a third team?" question is kind of misguided because Texas is freaking huge. California has five teams; we could manage three.
BUT Austin and Portland share an issue, which is...do yuppies and hipsters really love baseball? Is that something we can just assume? Is the Portlandia crowd all gonna come out and support a ballclub? What about UT kids?
I would still rank Austin pretty high on my list of places to put baseball, which is:
Brooklyn
San Jose
Austin
Vancouver
