GUILDERLAND — The Albany Dutchmen will not play at all this season.

The team, made up of college players hoping to be recruited by Major League teams, was unable to renew its lease with the town of Guilderland to use Dutchmen Field at Keenholts Park.

“The Dutchmen franchise, which will now go dark in 2024, is saddened to have to leave Guilderland,” said a notice posted to the Dutchmen website this week.

  “It was a community that we respected and felt at home in,” the post went on, “and was also a community that respected our mission: to offer a good quality, family-friendly, inexpensive entertainment option while also nurturing the baseball careers of college players from around the country and sending them back home, after the season was concluded, as more mature young men as well as better ball players.”

Jason Brinkman, the team’s general manager and vice president, had appeared along with team supporters before the Guilderland Town Board on April 16 to lobby for use of the field.

Brinkman, who grew up in Guilderland, told the board that the town-owned field is operated by Guilderland Babe Ruth. “The Babe Ruth board has refused to have any dialog on the matter …,” he said.

 The team paid $8,000 to Guilderland Babe Ruth for using the field on 20 game dates, Brinkman said, and 15 Guilderland families hosted the players each season. The games, he said, “drive tourism and economic impact” as the players’ families and fans travel to see the games, supporting local hotels, restaurants, shops, and gas stations

On April 19, members of the Babe Ruth board met with Brinkman along with town staff and had two hours of “frank conversation,” according to Guilderland Supervisor Peter Barber.

The bottom line, said Barber, is that Dutchmen Field “is very desirable.” It’s the only ballfield in town that has a professional feeling, he said, with lights for night games, stadium seating, and a large scoreboard.

The demands on the field and on volunteers to maintain it are heavy, said Barber.

Albany Dutchmen, Barber said, is a semi-pro, for-profit entity and its use of the field takes away from youth programs.

“I do credit Babe Ruth for trying to accommodate them for a couple of years,” he said.

Keenholts Park, founded in 1993, has eight minor baseball fields and five softball fields as well as Dutchmen Field, which got its name not from the semi-pro team but because the Guilderland schools use the Flying Dutchman, a legendary ship, as their mascot and it is often misconstrued as Dutchmen.

Barber said that the Albany Dutchmen were informed in January they could not use the field at Keenholts Park. Their season was to begin at the start of June.

Barber concluded, “We fully understand the residents’ involvement and the recreational value and the youth seeing top-notch baseball. In the end, it’s still a town park and needs to meet the needs of our residents and youth.”

Brinkman did not return calls or emailed questions from The Enterprise.

“The Albany Dutchmen were forced to lead a ‘nomad existence’ for our first eleven years due to the fact that we couldn’t find a facility in the Capital District that satisfied all the requirements of both our franchise and our league,” said the notice on the Albany Dutchmen website.

The team is one of 16 throughout New York state in the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League.

“The Dutchmen are aware that the PGCBL is planning to operate a replacement team in 2024, not based in Guilderland, for the purpose of honoring commitments and obligations to the remaining franchises in the league,” said the notice on the Albany Dutchmen website.

The Dutchmen stated this view of what went wrong: “We were told that unfortunately there was no room in the field schedule for us to be able to continue. We were also told that because of the addition of our 20 home games, the field didn’t have the proper amount of time to ‘recover’ between uses.

“Not wanting to challenge the grounds crew experts, even though we didn’t agree at all with their accusations that we failed to properly care for and respect the condition of the playing field, we found ourselves outnumbered by the opposition … and it became the final nail in the coffin for the Dutchmen.”