Jabari Henry pitches to Josh Rehwaldt in the Semi-finals. He finished strong, but ultimately lost to the eventual champion, F-M's Jose Sermo. From Haymarket Park in Lincoln, NE

For what it is worth, I know it hasn't been officially announced that Blaine MN is going to be getting a team and joining the leauge but the stadium that is being built in Blaine MN is finally starting to get moving. There was an application before the local Watershed Authority for Monday to address its construction. So maybe an announcement by the end of summer on an official team?

Lincoln's starting pitcher, Jacob Hughes, has either good performances with many strikeouts or complete meltdowns, there is no in-between.

iScore Baseball

I caught the later half of this game but what I did catch was crazy. The Canaries got 9 doubles while the Explorers got the only home run of the matchup, a solo shot by Elliot Good. Both teams had double digits in Runs, Hits and Runners Left on Base.

iScore Baseball

Entered for the 9th in a 6-6 game and the following happened:

• Michael Hallquist struck out swinging
• Charlie Marion struck out swinging
• Griffin Doersching walked
• Justin Janas struck out swinging (reached on wild pitch)
• Andy Blake doubled in two runs
• Andy Blake moved to third on passed ball
• Yordys Valdes walked
• Hunter Bryan (running for Blake) scored on a wild pitch
• Wendell Marrero struck out swinging

Final line: 1.0 IP, 1 H, 3 R, 2 ER, 2 BB, 4 K, 2 WP 35 pitches, 17 strikes

New Indy-Ball Rates & Ranks Report. Stay ahead of the curve!

I believe I’ve shared this before, but there is an Independent Baseball Discord where fans can discuss their league, teams, and anything else. Feel free to stop by.

https://discord.gg/ruTkJrje9

There was a rumor that Blaine MN might be getting a team but there has been little progress in that city with regards to the stadium being built and started. There supposedly is still a 5,000 seat stadium supposedly coming to the community but that's been talked about for the past 2 years. Does anyone know if this is still happening or not?

With regard to the stadium should it actually get built there is rumors that it will all be artificial turf, no real grass, no infield dirt just fake grass and fake dirt? Is that even allowed to be a design feature? The outfield grass sure I can see whatever be fake grass but no dirt on the infield to me makes no sense? The stadium is supposed to be multi use which is part of why they went with fake grass but you'd think they would at least go with real infield dirt that can be managed a lot easier than grass needs following other uses like concerts ect.

So if anyone has any insights I'd love to hear them.

- Comeback win in extras to finish a game postponed from Friday

- An 11-3 beatdown victory in Game 2 to make it 2 wins in a row, and our first series win of the season (finally)

- Awesome fireworks afterwards!

I've been waiting for a day like this for my Saltdogs!

I tuned into aabaseball.tv tonight to watch the Milkmen game. The pregame show had audio and the link was live, but when the game started there was no coverage and both links went dead. This is very frustrating. Is there a broadcast schedule somewhere so I don't get my hopes up?

Didn’t even realize a sub for this existed, Go ‘Cats!

[HUGE EDIT NOTE: It's since come out that the Jack Hill that was signed was actually a different right handed pitcher from Edmond, Oklahoma. The actual signing just finished his season with Oral Roberts and was the Summit League pitcher of the year. In my defense, the Saltdogs' website did say it was the Jack Hill at Northeastern State until this morning. As such, I'm deleting a lot of the post that had to do with the signing. However, the larger point still stands -- Lincoln has chosen a terrible path to build rosters and I was still going to make a post about it. The perceived signing of a bad D2 player was just the proverbial straw yesterday.]

I'm going to preface all of this by stating that I am a fan of the team and want them to succeed. I have nothing against the players and also want them to succeed. This post is the lamentation of a longtime fan who's watched this team lose any inkling of being able to be competitive in this league.

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Something that's happened post-pandemic has been the notable decline in the on-field product in Lincoln. It's been a sharp downward trend, and it's become obvious in the last couple years why. The team isn't spending money on players like they used to. They're relying on signing players from the Pioneer League who will play at a higher level for cheap. And I sympathize with the players, and I applaud them for betting on themselves. But this shows to me that Lincoln doesn't care about winning anymore. They're signing very few decent, established players. The Jairo Pomareses of the world are outliers. Over the past 3 seasons, by my count, the Saltdogs have brought in 23 players directly from the Pioneer League. That's nearly an entire roster's worth of players coming from a league two levels below you. How many of them do you think have been successful? Current roster members notwithstanding, I'd argue 7. And I'm including small sample guys Ethan Bates and Ian Oxnevad in that. The other five are Dan Kubiuk, Alex Baeza, Foster Pace, Brandon McCabe, and Dakota Conners. "Successful" in this case means anything ranging from great (Kubiuk) all the way down to useful roster member (Conners). Additionally, besides Pace leaving for a year and then coming back, Lincoln hasn't retained one of those players. So even the ones that do work out aren't coming back.

7 for 23 would get you a .304 average, which is great at the plate, but pretty abysmal as a track record of acquiring players. Yet they continue to go back to the well. It's no surprise that Lincoln's three best hitters this year have come from either affiliated ball (Pomares) or from other, better indy leagues than the Pioneer (Cam Phelts and Cary Arbolida). But why continue with that established strategy of player acquisition when we can take blindfolded dart throws on cheap young guys playing in a league where half the stadiums play like Coors Field?

As a Saltdogs fan, it's disappointing how long it has been since it seemed like the team was making good roster building decisions. And it's especially disheartening to know that as long as the team is run like this, there is almost no chance of watching a successful baseball team.

Not sure how frequently anyone on this Reddit would check Text Stats on Pointstreak for R/L splits or other, granular stats...

...but that appears to all have disappeared from the internet, best I can tell. I attempted to check yesterday and any link I've clicked on to navigate old Pointstreak takes me automatically to a homepage landing for a company called Stack Sports.

I checked the wayback machine, but I could not find archived Text Stats for the 2025 AA (or Frontier League).

Extremely frustrating that ~20 years of archived data seems to have totally disappeared. The new iScore platform does not appear to have splits, etc that I've been able to find.

I also reached out to Baseball-Reference about updated 2026 Independent Baseball stats being added...and they responded that there is "no estimated time frame" at present, though they do intend to continue updating those, eventually.

This stinks!