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JJ the Field General collects a bat during play.
Photo by Patricia O’Blenes
UTICA — The 2025 United Shore Professional Baseball League season came to an end in dramatic fashion with the Eastside Diamond Hoppers winning the team’s first league title.
The final score was 16-5 and the victory was over the Westside Woolly Mammoths. Since the four-team league’s inaugural season in 2016, only the Utica Unicorns and the Birmingham-Bloomfield Beavers have won the championship. 2025 was the third time the Diamond Hoppers had ever made the title game, while the Mammoths fell to 0-4 all time in the championship.
“They (the Diamond Hoppers) were in the championship game twice with one time being one out away from actually winning,” Diamond Hoppers manager Ryan Kottke said. “It was a nice sigh of relief and kind of a monkey off the back. … It was a cool feeling.”
The difference-maker for this year’s team was consistency. Independent ball is known for a lot of personnel changes throughout the year, and the Diamond Hoppers had a solid group that played together for a majority of the summer.
“There’s a lot of transactions, and at this level of professional baseball it’s in and out and in and out,” Kottke said. “We had 12 to 13 guys for a majority of the year.”
The player development system in the USPBL has also helped all the teams over the years. It’s a league that is producing more and more high-end talent, and a lot of that starts with focusing on winning.
“At this level you’re coming in to put up numbers and try to get to affiliated ball,” Kottke said. “But if not, you’re trying to put up numbers and trying to win that ring.”
As the USPBL continues to grow and thrive, the level of play increases and that makes winning a title more difficult each year. The challenge, and goal, of winning highlights what these four teams are all about.
“The level has stepped up. … We want more as coaches, we want more as a league, and we want our players to want more,” Kottke said. “We want to give back to the community, because they’ve accepted this for 10 years and they’ve embraced it for 10 years.”
On the field, the level of play continues to grow with each season. Off the field, Jimmy John’s Field and the USPBL have become integrated with the community, and in 2025 that was taken to new heights.
“We had a great year in terms of working with the community,” USPBL owner, Commissioner and CEO Andy Appleby said. “We had over 1,100 charities leverage the ballpark to raise money; we had 67,000 kids in our reading program. … I really couldn’t have been too much happier.”
The league has also become a legitimate and respectable pipeline for Major League Baseball talent. After the Colorado Rockies called up reliever Dugan Darnell this summer, the league has now produced seven MLB players and 52 total players have been signed by MLB teams.
“Along the lines of baseball, I was really hoping for one or two of our guys getting even signed by Major League teams (when the league started),” Appleby said. “It’s an amazing thing that you can come to Utica and you just never know who you’re going to see.”
After 10 years of the USPBL, the road ahead continues to be as exciting as ever. Appleby even hinted at a possibility to expand the league to more than four teams in the near future.
“I think the biggest thing is we’ve been talking about expansion for a long time,” Appleby said. “I’ve been working exceedingly hard with a bunch of different communities to make that happen. … But I truly think within the next year we’ll have an announcement and probably within two years we’ll have our second ballpark.”
The 2025 season gave the community a first-time league champion, fundraisers and fun events all summer. It also left fans excited about what the next chapter is for the Utica staple.
