Benjamin Hill travels the nation collecting stories about what makes Minor League Baseball unique. This excerpt from his newsletter is a mere taste of the smorgasbord of delights he offers every week. Read the full newsletter here, and subscribe to his newsletter here.
When we last checked in with the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, the New York Mets¡¯ Double-A affiliate had just released their Bathtub Donkeys alternate identity. This tribute to an archaic and perhaps apocryphal state law will be complemented on the team¡¯s 2025 promotional calendar by another, perhaps even more absurd, alter ego:
The Southern Tier Spicy Meatballs.
"The primary logo features a meatball portrayed as an Italian gondolier on a bed of pasta making its way through a river of sauce with a baseball bat fork," wrote the Rumble Ponies in their press release, providing a perfect example of how, in Minor League Baseball, even straightforward descriptions carry a strong whiff of the whimsical. "The secondary logo features the baseball bat fork of the meatball bat gondolier with spaghetti noodles wrapped around the utensil."
That¡¯s what the Spicy Meatballs look like, but why do they exist in the first place?
There is a significant Italian population throughout central New York¡¯s Southern Tier region, of which Binghamton is a part. The Rumble Ponies specifically single out nearby Endicott as an epicenter of Italian heritage; this locale, along with Binghamton and Johnson City, makes up the Southern Tier¡¯s ¡°Triple Cities¡± metropolitan area. (From 1923-68, Binghamton¡¯s Minor League team was known as the Triplets, a reference to the Triple Cities.)
"In the early days of Endicott, N.Y., an area known as the North Side was huge with Italian roots," according to the press release. "Many of the Italian immigrants moving to the region worked at the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company, Inc. However, many property owners would not sell land to Italian immigrants, so Endicott-Johnson purchased properties for their employees and along the cobblestone streets of Endicott grew the vibrant community of Little Italy..."
The Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company, established in 1899, was for a time the largest manufacturer of footwear in the nation. Company president George Johnson, known for his philanthropy and generally enlightened approach to labor relations, bestowed the region with six carousels between 1919 and 1934. These carousels, still operating, inspired the Binghamton Mets to change their name from the Mets to the Rumble Ponies in 2016. A Rumble Pony, you see, is a slang for a carousel horse.
Despite the influence of the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company within the Southern Tier region, the Rumble Ponies have yet to unveil a footwear-themed alternate identity. For an example of such, one doesn¡¯t have to leave the state of New York, or the Mets' farm system. In 2018, the Triple-A Syracuse Chiefs (now known as the Mets) played as the Devices, an homage to the ubiquitous Brannock Device foot measuring tool that was invented in Syracuse.
As for the Southern Tier Spicy Meatballs, the aforementioned meatball gondolier will be depicted within a uniform featuring a green, red and white color scheme (in a nod to the Italian flag). The Rumble Ponies will adopt this identity from Aug. 14-16, in conjunction with the annual bazaar staged by the nearby St. Mary of the Assumption church.
Though it remains to be seen how the Spicy Meatballs will fare on the field, their mere existence has already generated plenty of online enthusiasm. No less an entity than the State of New York was moved to weigh in, simply tweeting, "This eats."
Mangia, mangia!