'Andersen night' in Portland is a whole new ball game

The accountancy firm Arthur Andersen may be in ruins – bankrupted, convicted of fraud and disintegrating – but at least the Portland Beavers still love them.

So the Oregon minor league baseball team has just come up with surely the zaniest promotion of the season: Arthur Andersen Appreciation Night.

At their home game on 18 July against Edmonton, any fan named Arthur or Andersen will be admitted free. The first person named Arthur Andersen to turn up to the match will receive a gift package, including a party in a luxury suite for 80 people.

Spectators are being asked to bring along old documents too – to be disposed off at several "shredding stations" installed in the ballpark – in tribute to those tons of audit documents shredded by Enron last year that caused Andersen so much grief.

Anderson also "audited" the books of WorldCom, where the hapless accounting firm seems to have missed $3.8bn (£2.4bn) of concealed losses. Mark Schuster, the Beavers' general manager, said: "We're sure WorldCom's not going to be the last. With all the negative stuff that's come out of this, sooner or later you've got to laugh about it."

And the Beavers are not exactly strangers to "negative stuff". Their parent company, Portland Family Entertainment, got into financial difficulties after the team had lost $8m in its first year of operations, so a hotshot marketing group was called in to take the Beavers over.

Hence the Andersen stunt. And one other thing: the stadium where the Beavers play is called PGE Park, named after Portland General Electric, a utility which just happens to be owned by Enron.