The Jamestown Jammers (summer collegiate; Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League) are set to return to action in 2020, with local ownership taking over the club.
While they are on hiatus for the 2019 season, it had been anticipated that the Jammers could field a team in 2020 under plans announced last fall by now former owner ROC Ventures. The plan for ROC Ventures was to donate the club and its assets to a nonprofit group that would, in turn, seek new local investors to keep the team in Jamestown.
Those plans are now taking shape, as Jamestown Community Baseball LLC signed an asset purchase agreement at an announcement at Russell E. Diethrick Jr. Park on Monday afternoon. The entity will be backed by a slate of investors, and is facilitating the team’s return to PGCBL play in 2020. More from the Post-Journal:
Russell E. Diethrick Jr., president of its board of directors, signed the asset purchase agreement, an act that transferred the Jammers’ franchise to the JCB LLC in anticipation of returning to the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League next season. Approval for the transaction was granted by both the PGCBL last week and the City of Jamestown at its council meeting Monday night.
“The future is now,” said JCB LLC board member Greg Peterson. “We can say that with a sense of pride. “ … This is historic in the sense that it’s really been the first time since, really, in the early 1960s that this baseball (team) is community owned.”
JCB LLC is a membership organization operating under a subscription-based model. The seven-member board of directors already has a number of investors, who are pledging their support for the future of baseball in Jamestown.
The PGCBL champions in 2018, the Jammers announced in October that they would cease operation for 2019, but ROC Ventures — the now-former owner — agreed to donate the team and its assets to the local non-profit group.
The summer-collegiate Jammers have played at Russell E. Diethrick Jr. Park since 2015, when they took the place of an affiliated Short Season A New York-Penn League squad of the same name after it relocated to West Virginia. The team was initially part of the Prospect League, but shifted to the PGCBL in 2016.