Border Cats ready for start of 2025 Northwoods League season
Team plays its home opener at Port Arthur Stadium on May 28
Canada will be well-represented when the Thunder Bay Border Cats take the field for the 2025 Northwoods League baseball season.
The Cats are the only Canadian team in the Northwoods League, which is a summer collegiate league made up of NCAA players.
The team is set to play its home opener on May 28 at Port Arthur Stadium, hosting the Rochester Honkers for a four-game homestand. The Cats actually start the 2025 season on the road on May 26 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
In any case, the bulk of the Cats's 35-player roster will be Canadian, field manager Joe Ellison said Friday.
"We're returning a good base of players that were there last year," Ellison said. "Adding some good American talent, but also a lot of Canadian."
"We added another Canadian this morning, so we will be probably 23 or 24 players from a Canadian family at some point throughout the summer."
Overall, Ellison — this season will be his first as Cats field manager — said this year's team will be a fast one.
"We're going to be able to play fast," he said. "We have a lot of talent that comes from four-year schools or they're transferring to four year schools this coming year, so we're going to be a little bit older, which I think is good, but I think we're going to be able to play fast offensively."
"We've got some guys with some thump in the lineup as well."
Team general manager and vice-president Bryan Graham echoed that.
"I think we're going to have some pretty good speed in the lineup," he said. "In this league, with the wooden bats and the players coming from college baseball where they swing aluminum you can't really rely on on the long ball and power."
"You always want to build your team on on good pitching and good defence, and be able to run the bases and take that extra base if you can. So I think, you know, most of the teams in the Northwoods have always tried to put their roster together like that."
Graham said the team is not seeing much in the way of effects yet from the Canada-United States trade war.
"We're very fortunate that way," Graham said. "There are some tariffs coming in on some of the stuff, but we managed to kind of get ahead of that and and acquire those items prior to some of these tariffs being instituted."
Those items, Graham said, include baseballs and bats, which are ordered from the United States.
"Obviously the Canadian dollar sometimes is a big factor in some of our costs," he said. "But overall, we're in pretty good shape and at the moment."
Graham said the stadium itself is being readied for the start of the season.
"We need to get some sun and some warmer temperatures," he said. "Obviously there's a lot of work to be done in terms of just getting the field ready for the season, but it looked like it weathered pretty well during the winter."
And some improvements are coming, as well.
"We're going to be unveiling a new party deck," Graham said. "We have the existing party deck on the first base side, but we're enhancing that deck, which I think the fans are really going to enjoy."
Graham said the Cats ticket office, which is located at the stadium, will open on Monday.