CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – The season has come to an end for all but 64 NCAA baseball teams, which means players from each school that did not make the NCAA Tournament are moving on to their summer baseball homes.
Some of the top players in the country will travel to upstate New York this summer to play in the prestigious Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League, one of the best summer leagues in the country. More and more PGCBL alumni make their professional debuts each year, and a number have gone on to careers in the major leagues like Hunter Pence (Amsterdam), J.D. Martinez (Watertown), and Mike Fiers (Oneonta).
The PGCBL was founded in 2010 and played its first season in the summer of 2011. The league has experienced a lot of success in its five-plus years of existence, growing in size in almost every year. When the PGCBL was started in 2010 it consisted of eight teams — Albany, Amsterdam, Cooperstown, Elmira, Glens Falls, Mohawk Valley, Newark, and Watertown.
Starting in 2016, the PGCBL will have 13 teams competing for a championship in August. The Geneva Red Wings, Jamestown Jammers, and Oneonta Outlaws will join the other 10 already-existing teams in the league to make it as big as it’s ever been.
“We added three new teams this year, which is really exciting,” Justin Mattingly, the assistant to the president of the PGCBL said. “With those three new teams, we’re the biggest we’ve ever been. It’s nice that we cover most of New York State now from east to west. You look at Jamestown, Geneva, Oneonta, those teams have historically had pretty good players.”
The Amsterdam Mohawks have been the team to beat the past four years, winning the league championship in three of those four seasons. After finishing the 2015 regular season in first place with a 40-10 record, Amsterdam looked primed to move the championship run to four-straight, but the three-time defending champions were knocked out of the playoffs in the second round by the eventual-champion Mohawk Valley DiamondDawgs.
If the DiamondDawgs want to repeat as champions in 2016, they will have to do so in a new playoff format, due to the increase of teams in the league. The 2015 playoffs featured six teams, with the winners of both the East and West division getting a bye in the first round.
The 2016 playoffs will be expanded to eight teams, with a one-game first round matchup between the 1 and 4-seed, as well as a 2-seed vs. 3-seed matchup. The winner of each first round game will then have to get through two three-game series to be crowned champions.
With so much turnover on summer league rosters each year, it can sometimes be hard to get a good sense of how teams will look on the field each year. However, there are a few players returning for another year in the PGCBL that starred in the league in 2015.
Junior righthander Marc Iseneker from St. John Fisher College will return to lead the defending champ Mohawk Valley pitching staff. Iseneker was ninth in the league a year ago in strikeouts with 47, posting a 3.75 ERA in nine starts and throwing one complete game.
Anthony Rocco is back for the Saugerties Stallions. The junior lefty from Pace University ended the 2015 season with a 2.82 ERA, good enough for ninth in the league. Rocco was tied for second on the Stallions with 30 strikeouts in 54 1/3 innings last year, and tied for the team lead with three wins.
The Utica Blue Sox (who changed its name this season from the Utica Brewers) have one of the best power hitters in the league returning to the middle of its lineup in 2016. Taylor Olmstead, from Southern New Hampshire University, hit seven home runs in 2015, tied for second in the category. Olmstead, who hit .265 last summer with four doubles and five triples along with the seven home runs, is also a threat on the basepaths, swiping 10 bags in 2015.
Among the most intriguing roster spots filled for the 2016 season come from Amsterdam, and they belong to a pair of high school pitchers. Ian Anderson (Rexford, New York) and Jeff Belge (Syracuse, New York) have both signed to play for the Mohawks, but both will hear their names called early in the 2016 MLB Draft. According to Perfect Game, Anderson — a 6-foot-3 righthander — is the No. 9 overall prospect in the draft, and Belge is the 168th-ranked player. Anderson has committed to play his college ball at Vanderbilt if he decides to go to school, and Belge has pledged to St. Johns.
Both players participated in last summer’s Perfect Game All-American Classic prior to the senior years in high school.
“It will be interesting to see if the Amsterdam high school guys decide to go to college,” Mattingly said. “If they do, they’ll be in Amsterdam for the summer, which would be cool because they’re both really talented.”
The pair may choose to sign with whatever team drafts them, and in that case would not play in Amsterdam this summer.
The league experienced one of its better years in attendance in 2015, with more than 205,000 fans attending games across the 10 venues. The attendance jump was led by the Elmira Pioneers, who had a record attendance of 81,037 last summer.
The 3,377 fans per home game was the second-highest average in all of collegiate summer baseball, and the 81,037 grand total was the 10th-most in all of the summer collegiate leagues. The Northwoods League, which had all but one team in the top-10, play 10 more home games than Elmira in 2015.
“[Elmira] games are awesome,” Mattingly said. “There’s so much to do, there’s so much entertainment at the games…it’s always more fun when there are a lot of people in the park. Some people go for the baseball, some people go for the fireworks, but it doesn’t matter why you go. It’s just fun.”
The PGCBL continues to take steps forward in growing the league. It is becoming more and more competitive each year, with the top talent in college baseball realizing that some of the best summer ball is played in upstate New York.