Book review: Homestand: Small Town Baseball And The Fight For The Soul of America by Will Bardenwerper

Haven't done a book review in awhile, and this one belongs on The Knothole.

The cover depicts the approaching “crepuscular hour” at Dwyer Stadium in Batavia, New York - home of the resurrected Batavia Muckdogs.

On September 1, 2019, unbeknownst to the 1,017 patrons in attendance at Dwyer Stadium, the Batavia Muckdogs, who were the Rookie affiliate of the Miami Marlins in the NY-Penn League, were playing their final home game as a longstanding member of that league. (Their final game would be the next day in Auburn, New York.)

A year later, the small town of about 15,000 was devastated to learn that its team would be contracted, along with most of the remaining teams in the NYPL, as part of a minor league restructuring. Because the 2020 minor league season was wiped out by the COVID scare, the town never got to say goodbye.

Fast forward to the summer of 2022, and after finding an owner willing to resurrect the team as a college summer league team the year before, the restored Batavia Muckdogs were once again entertaining fans at Dwyer Stadium, and author Will Bardenwerper made it his mission: not just to chronicle the doings of the players or a select group of fans who made Dwyer their summer home - a pair regularly making a 45-minute commute from their homes in the Buffalo area - but to use the summer’s events as a canvas to talk about the state of baseball as a sport and the fate of a small town trying to regain its footing in post-Rust Belt America.

Will isn’t a stranger to the diamond - he played collegiately at Princeton for two seasons - but his path to writing a baseball book was unique. After working for a Manhattan-based financial firm on 9/11, Bardenwerper soon felt compelled to serve in the Army and was shipped off to a combat role in Iraq. (This was the subject of Will’s first book, The Prisoner in his Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid. Ironically, he left copies for the team to read over the summer but there weren’t a lot of takers.)

Beginning in December 2021 when he visited with superfans Betsey Higgins and Ginny Wagner at an offseason merchandise sale, Will was setting up the contacts he would need to write the compelling fan story. Next we meet team owner Robbie and Nellie Nichols, who own both the Muckdogs and competing Elmira Pioneers, both members of the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League. The players would come later, most of them being met at a meet-and-greet shortly before the June 1 start of the season along with manager Skip Martinez. Most of these players were small-college guys who paid the team a significant fee ($1,500) to play, just looking to improve their draft stock once they became eligible or eventually grab a chance with a professional independent league. In return, they got room, board, meals, and the opportunity to play 40-odd games against a peer group of similarly-based teams. We also get a good glimpse of the behind-the-scenes employees who make the team run.

But the book isn’t completely about the players, the fans, the workers, or the state of baseball and our nation. It’s a blend of all of these elements, parceled out on a journal-like basis regularly during the Muckdogs’ season. In addition, Bardenwerper takes us into his home life with his wife and young children as well as on a short family vacation down south where, among other things, he stops to see Delmarva’s league rivals the Kannapolis CannonBallers. (Alas, it wasn’t a game against us.) It’s a lot of folks to keep track of - this is one rare book I’ve read with a Dramatis Personae to keep all the (real-life) characters straight.

As the Muckdogs’ season comes to its climactic end in the league championship series, you get the sense that Will has found his second home among the faithful in Batavia. To be quite honest, it makes me wonder if he ever considered moving his family during those commutes up I-79 from his Pittsburgh-area home to that friendly small town in western New York as the book was being written. Certainly I could track the players down from the agate type of Baseball Reference (which covers these college-level leagues as well as the affiliated and independent minor leagues - it turns out the team’s ace pitcher, Nolan Sparks, was eventually drafted by the Cardinals in 2024 as the one player who has advanced to that level so far) and Bardenwerper adds a little bit of a postscript at the end regarding the fans and management but it would be nice to know what he’s up to now.

While I’m not sure I completely agree with Will’s negative characterization of red-state America - western New York was and remains Trump country for the most part - it’s not a complete distraction from the tale. And that’s because there is a lot that can be said about how the game of baseball has gone away from the sport and become a business with a bottom line where players are now just so much data. And with one passage in the book noting:

More than one former minor league owner, as well as industry insiders, expressed fears that 2020’s contraction of the minor leagues was just “phase one,” with another possible round cutting the number of minor league teams from 120 to 90 on the horizon.

I, as one of those fans who has a team at the lowest level outside the teams’ minor league complexes, remain concerned. Our contract is only good through 2030 and stadium renovations are but a sunk cost. It wouldn’t surprise me at that point to see the A-level teams disappear to become a second, advanced team at each minor league complex, leaving Salisbury, Maryland in the boat Batavia was in after 2020. That sense was what made Homestand appealing for me to read.

Overall, this was a book I was happy to purchase and would recommend you do the same. It makes for a good read during those weeks when your favorite minor league team is away.

Speaking of buying things: you can also Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now. I don’t ask as much at The Knothole as I do my primary site, but I like to have the support nonetheless.