Get a taste of the Portland Pickles in MLB Network documentary
Benjamin Hill
@BensBizThe Portland Pickles are a summer-collegiate baseball team that develops highly-touted players within a quirky, boundary-pushing, lovingly chaotic atmosphere. Every night is a party at the team's home of Walker Stadium, and now the party is coming to you.
¡°Pickles, Pickles, Pickles,¡± a one-hour documentary, debuts on the MLB Network on Saturday at 2 p.m. ET and will be available on-demand for MLB.TV subscribers shortly thereafter. The documentary, directed by Jordan Rowland and produced by team owner Alan Miller, celebrates the underdog. It was filmed during the 2024 season, in which the Pickles defeated the powerhouse Corvallis Knights enroute to their first West Coast League championship.
If you¡¯re already aware of the Portland Pickles and you¡¯re not from the Pacific Northwest, then chances are the team grabbed your attention with an irreverent social media post (one, involving an easy-to-misinterpret mascot selfie, went particularly viral). ¡°Pickles, Pickles, Pickles¡± acknowledges Portland's notoriety in the social media realm but emphasizes that, first and foremost, the team is a product of its town.
The Pickles follow in the footsteps of the Portland Mavericks, an independent team in the 1970s who were themselves the subject of a documentary, ¡°The Battered Bastards of Baseball.¡± They, in short, embrace the weird. As superfan Ron ¡°The K Man¡± Clark put it, ¡°The Pickles are a little bit off, just like Portland.¡±
West Coast League commissioner Rob Neyer said that ¡°I don¡¯t know that anyone worries about their freak flag when they go to a Pickles game, and that¡¯s how it should be.¡±
At Pickles games, fans blow into conch shells to get a rally going and lift chairs in the air in celebration of great plays. (Per in-the-stands emcee Jeremiah Coughlan, ¡°Anything that happens once becomes a tradition.¡±) Exploits in the documentary include various attempts to send a pickle into orbit in a homemade rocket, the controlled demolition of a paper mache whale and -- why not? -- a unicyclist in a kilt and Darth Vader mask playing a flaming bagpipe. Mascot Dillon ¨C he of unfortunate selfie fame ¨C is in the center of it all.
The fans have responded to these antics, as an opening montage of recently-applied Portland Pickles tattoos make clear. Rob Nelson, a member of the Mavericks who went on to invent Big League Chew, is a regular at Walker Stadium (capacity 4,500). So are members of indie rock bands The Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney and Portugal. The Man.
Miller, who purchased the team in 2016 along with a group that includes former NFL punter Jon Ryan, says in the film that the Pickles are ¡°DIY [do it yourself] 'til we die. This is punk rock baseball.¡±
In a conversation with MLB.com, he elaborated further.
¡°[The Pickles] were a little bit of a spite purchase, to be honest with you,¡± said Miller. ¡°Having run a marketing agency [COLLiDE] for a long time, we do a lot of campaigns for big brands. Ten-to-12 years ago, we started getting into a lot of sports work. And what we found was, every time we deliver something to a professional team they would be like, ¡®Oh, it¡¯s a little scary for us.¡¯ ¡ After a few of these, I¡¯m like ¡®I¡¯m going to prove it to you, that if you¡¯re an authentic team and work with local musicians and artists and culture makers and restauranteurs, you will have an incredibly robust community of fans no matter what.¡¯ And so the Pickles were the shot that we took.¡±
As ¡°Pickles, Pickles, Pickles¡± makes clear, the general tomfoolery surrounding the team at its home of Walker Stadium is in service to the game of baseball. The fans root hard for the players, many of whom get drafted by Major League organizations. Manager Mark Magdaleno is featured prominently in the documentary¡¯s final third, as his squad of underdogs make it to the promised land.
¡°We couldn¡¯t have been in a better place to capture that,¡± said Miller.
The Pickles are aiming to be ¡°Back to Back Chips¡± in 2025, kicking off their season in late May. Highlights of the promotions schedule include Fermentation Night, Danny Dill-vito Night and, uh, Toot Night 2: Silent but Deadly. You just don¡¯t know what you¡¯ll see at a Pickles game, only that baseball will be in the center of it all.
¡°Portland is one of the best counterculture markets in America. People are always open to something that¡¯s new and unique and different,¡± said Miller. ¡°So we challenge ourselves every offseason to put something together that is really fun, very funny and something for everyone to enjoy.¡±