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Quick Thinking May Have Saved Jammers

Thanks to some quick thinking by Mayor Sam Teresi, there is a chance the sounds of baseball will fill Russell E. Diethrick Stadium in 2020.

ROC Ventures, which owned the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League team, would have been well within its rights to maximize its investment by selling the team to one of the organizations that showed interest. That new organization likely would have moved the team out of Jamestown to play in a different league, so Teresi asked ROC Ventures to donate the team and its assets to a local non-profit group. At the same time, Teresi and the Jamestown Community Baseball LLC organization quickly negotiated a place in the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League in 2020 as long as local ownership can be secured and a team fielded properly.

No one wants to see the park empty next summer, but returning the Jamestown Jammers to action two summers from now is a better alternative than the Jammers moving away for good. Without the quick work of Teresi and people like Greg Peterson and Russell E. Diethrick Jr., the Jammers would be as good as gone.

Jamestown, particularly given its financial problems, cannot be the operator of a baseball team, so some sort of local ownership group has to be formed. Then, that local ownership group needs to create a workable budget, hire necessary staff, scout and sign players — all by May 2019. That’s the deadline the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League has set for Jamestown to show it belongs in the summer league. Not mentioned is building the sort of attendance that can sustain a baseball team. One can’t help but note that attendance for the Jammers — either as a New York-Penn League team or as a summer collegiate team — haven’t been good for a long time. That’s a stark contrast to the scores of people who took to social media to lament the loss of the Jammers a couple of weeks ago.

Jamestown will only get one more chance to prove it can sustain a baseball team. We hope area residents don’t squander the opportunity.

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