Editorial Content for Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
In 2021, following the COVID season in which Major League games were played in empty stadiums, the powers-that-be decided that minor league baseball was basically not worth the money. MLB cut 40 squads, dropping the total number of affiliated teams to 120.
In addition to depriving hundreds of players the opportunity to live out their dream by reaching “the Show,” the pronouncement also affected millions of fans in those towns and cities that were cut, denying them that quaint image of warm summer nights spent at small ballparks, enjoying the company of friends over a frosty beer and a hot dog.
That’s the picture that Will Bardenwerper paints in his new book, HOMESTAND: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America.
"Bardenwerper was obviously enamored of his embedded experience, getting to know these people whom he otherwise might have had nothing to do with for various reasons, including political views."
“What is baseball?” he asks in the introduction. “Is it really our ‘National Pastime,’ an enduring slice of Americana, as the powers-that-be marketed it for decades? Or is it --- as the decisions made by MLB’s owners and Commissioner Rob Manfred’s front office would suggest --- just a business, where efficiency and profits drive all the decisions?”
Bardenwerper spent a season following the Batavia Muckdogs, a former bush league club that was transformed into a sort of advanced travel team for college-aged aspirants, where players paid for the privilege of living the sporting life. But it’s not only about the game on the field or the players; it’s also about the fans who live in Batavia (as well as Elmira and the dozens of other small towns) and what has been taken away.
The author rails against the MLB system as he gets to know some of the local residents who have been supporting their minor league clubs for years and seem like stock actors from a Frank Capra movie: the elderly couple who have been together since high school; the pair of single middle-aged women who love to be in the stands; the husband-and-wife owners of the Batavia and Elmira teams, who barely make a profit but stick with it for the love of the game.
The earnestness can be a bit much as Bardenwerper waxes philosophical about what baseball means to small-town America --- with its boarded-up storefronts and run-down streets, evidence of a declining economy and population as younger people make their exodus to bigger cities.
Bardenwerper was obviously enamored of his embedded experience, getting to know these people whom he otherwise might have had nothing to do with for various reasons, including political views. But HOMESTAND is full of platitudes bordering on the cliché.
“Players come and players go,” Bardenwerper writes, quoting another author. “But it is the fans, passing lifetimes in the bleachers, who give minor league baseball its sense of permanence.”
He concludes: “[I]t was precisely these fans who had been reduced to impersonal numbers populating an Excel spreadsheet when MLB decided to wipe out minor league baseball in forty-two communities like Batavia, each populated by its own unique cast of characters to whom the game meant so much.”
Cue the Randy Newman soundtrack.
Teaser
Batavia, New York --- between Rochester and Buffalo --- hosted its first professional baseball game in 1897. Despite decades of deindustrialization and evaporating middle-class jobs, the Batavia Muckdogs endured. When Major League Baseball cravenly shut them down in 2020 --- along with 41 other minor league teams --- the town fought back, reviving the Muckdogs as a summer league team comprised of college players. As MLB considers further cuts and private equity buys up what remains, the mom-and-pop operations once prevalent in baseball are endangered. But for now, the sights and sounds of local baseball live on in Batavia. Will Bardenwerper's HOMESTAND exposes the beating heart of small town America, friends and neighbors coming together as the crack of the bat echoes in the summer twilight.
Promo
Batavia, New York --- between Rochester and Buffalo --- hosted its first professional baseball game in 1897. Despite decades of deindustrialization and evaporating middle-class jobs, the Batavia Muckdogs endured. When Major League Baseball cravenly shut them down in 2020 --- along with 41 other minor league teams --- the town fought back, reviving the Muckdogs as a summer league team comprised of college players. As MLB considers further cuts and private equity buys up what remains, the mom-and-pop operations once prevalent in baseball are endangered. But for now, the sights and sounds of local baseball live on in Batavia. Will Bardenwerper's HOMESTAND exposes the beating heart of small town America, friends and neighbors coming together as the crack of the bat echoes in the summer twilight.
About the Book
A poignant memoir exploring small-town baseball as a lens into what’s right and wrong with modern America --- written by an acclaimed journalist and Army Ranger who, after returning from Iraq to a painfully divided country, rediscovered its core values in the bleachers of a minor league ballpark in Batavia, New York.
What happens when a minor league team --- the heart and soul of a Rust Belt town in western New York --- is shut down by the billionaires who run Major League Baseball?
Batavia, New York --- between Rochester and Buffalo --- hosted its first professional baseball game in 1897. Despite decades of deindustrialization and evaporating middle-class jobs, the Batavia Muckdogs endured. When Major League Baseball cravenly shut them down in 2020 --- along with 41 other minor league teams --- the town fought back, reviving the Muckdogs as a summer league team comprised of college players. As MLB considers further cuts and private equity buys up what remains, the mom-and-pop operations once prevalent in baseball are endangered. But for now, the sights and sounds of local baseball live on in Batavia --- cheap draft beer and hot dogs, starry-eyed kids seeking autographs, and breathtaking summer sunsets.
With a vibrant, unforgettable cast of characters --- from a librarian and her best friend whose relationship deepens with every “crepuscular hour” they spend together in the bleachers, to the former hockey brawler-turned team owner who greets regulars while working the concession stand, to the iconoclastic writer with a contagious love for his struggling hometown --- Will Bardenwerper’s HOMESTAND exposes the beating heart of small-town America, friends and neighbors coming together as the crack of the bat echoes in the summer twilight.
Audiobook available, read by Dan Bittner
