The Double-A Binghamton Rumble Ponies, an affiliate of the New York Mets in the Eastern League, will play three games in 2025 as the Southern Tier Spicy Meatballs. The nickname is a tribute to the Italian-American population in New York’s Southern Tier, a loosely defined geographic region along the state’s border with Pennsylvania. That community is particularly prevalent in Endicott, New York, about 10 miles west of Binghamton, where immigrants established a thriving Little Italy.

The nickname Spicy Meatballs evokes a 1969 Alka Seltzer commercial, in which a stereotypically Italian actor repeatedly flubs the line “That’s a spicy meatball” while eating a plate of pasta.

The Spicy Meatballs uniforms feature colors straight from the Italian flag, white, red, and green. The primary logo is an anthropomorphic meatball as gondolier, navigating a river of sauce with a baseball bat fork, while a secondary logo features the baseball bat fork wrapped in spaghetti noodles.