By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
They’re back.
The Y’alls . . . and the smiles that accompany the return of baseball to Florence every spring. So many smiles.
Oh, and the offense, too. It was back, big time.
Still, the first thing you notice on entering Thomas More Stadium for Tuesday’s 2026 home opener for Northern Kentucky’s lone professional baseball team is the way everybody – well pretty much everybody – is smiling.
And the game hasn’t started. Like the two kids not yet in school, as they eye the Y’alls’-themed inflatable slide and bounce house helmet in the Kids’ Zone down the right field line.
“Let’s go eat first,” their grand-dad says, looking at the popcorn and hot dogs they’re holding in both arms. And then they’re off, heading to a place with a pirate ship with slides and a basketball court with three different adjustable goals.
Boone County Judge-Executive Gary Moore throws out one of the first pitches and he’s all smiles when it gets all the way to the plate.
The game’s start doesn’t slow down the concourse-filling traffic from this family-first crowd. Nor does the Mississippi Mud Monsters rolling out an actual monster of a pitcher, 7-footer Brenton Thiels.
But back-to-back-to-back first-inning home runs by a Y’alls’ team that had been no-hit in its season opener Thursday at Evansville, well, that brought more smiles and cheers and pats on the back and all sorts of fun from this capacity crowd of 3,349. After all, that’s why they’re here – to cheer.
And a 13-5 season’s first win gave them plenty of chances to do that. “I think we have the offensive talent,” first-year manager Toby Hall said after the game. “And we can field it. We’re working on figuring out the pitching.”
One other thing Hall, who played nine years as an MLB catcher — seven in Tampa Bay and then with the Dodgers and White Sox — said. “The biggest thing is to build chemistry.” Which is why he brought three players from the Windy City team he managed last season.
One of those is third baseman Garrett Broussard, from San Juan Capistrano, Calif. He’s one of a trio of Californians on this team who proved Hall’s offense evaluation seems to be on the money. “It started with those two home runs from Californians,” Broussard said of the back-to-back “jacks” by first baseman Hank Zeisler from Kentfield and right-fielder Brendan Bobo from Santa Cruz.
And it continued as Zade Richardson out of the Cincinnati suburb of New Richmond, made it back-to-back-to-back “jacks” in the first.
Then last year’s Y’alls’ MVP Zeisler, with a second straight opposite field homer giving him five quick RBI – and Bobo, whose first homer was a 116-mph blast to deep center followed up with another on an all-California night that had Broussard adding three hits for Manager Hall a native of Placerville.
“We all played together in summer ball,” Broussard said of their ability to generate chemistry on a new team. All told, Zeisler, who played at Missouri, had seven RBI and three runs scored. Bobo’s second homer was a three-run shot giving him four RBI on his two blasts.
This is the kind of game the Y’alls need to compete in the nation’s longest running independent baseball organization sprawling from French-speaking Canada to Mississippi, with teams in many of the major metropolitan areas in between from Boston to New York/New Jersey, from Pittsburgh to Chicago, from St. Louis to Lake Erie, this league is pretty much everywhere in the Eastern and Central time zones.
It’s an 18-team minor league monster where the Y’alls’ fans are coming off a season when they outperformed the guys they’d come to watch. In the stadium, the Y’alls’ fans were the league’s sixth-best with 2,341 a game – 110,021 in 47 games last season.
On the field, the team was just 12th out of 18 with a 43-53 record as they never got above .500 last season. And now, with its new manager and 15 new players, gets a chance to show off Northern Kentucky as it hosts its first All-Star Week and all the festivities July 13-15, the first here in the league’s 33 years.
This Y’alls’ roster has players from 12 states, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. And it’s an interesting environment with so many young children in the crowd and a stadium sound of a grade school playground at recess.
But the season will get serious as the historic Frontier League moves on to a new place this summer as it re-brands itself as the National Association of Professional Baseball (NAPB) for 2027 with the introduction of the new brand logo in Northern Kentucky during All-Star Week.
And if that’s not enough of a local connection, a Covington brand/marketing consulting firm – BLDG – will oversee it all while the All-Star Banquet will be at the Newport Car Barn July 13.
Despite the fireworks on the field, at least a third of the crowd seemed on foot, headed somewhere, filling the concourses and the hillsides, heading to the Kids’ Zone and the shaded picnic areas. Or maybe the team’s General Store.
Although nothing could match the hundreds and hundreds of kids making the jaunt from the Kids’ Zone to third base in the middle of the fourth inning. That had everybody buzzing.
Just the way all those home runs among the Y’alls’ 13 hits did.