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 loving 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: 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.