After losing ground to football and basketball, baseball might not be the national pastime anymore, but it is certainly the national bellwether, the sport that has defined America and charted its ups and downs.
Baseball has changed significantly in the last 15 years, along with the technological “advances” that have overtaken American culture. As Michael Lewis documented in Moneyball, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, built his teams by focusing on atypical statistics, such as O.P.S. (the combination of slugging and on-base percentage)—a revolutionary move in the early 2000s.
Beane ushered in the analytics era, proving that small-market clubs could compete with rich juggernauts if they ignored traditional metrics—such as home runs and batting average—and instead focused on the advanced statistics that showed a player’s true value. The analytics revolution changed the game, but some of that old baseball magic has been lost in the process.
Almost lost, anyway. In Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America, Will Bardenwerper discovers that it still exists in the Rust Belt town of Batavia, New York.
The Batavia Muckdogs were a minor-league affiliate that played in the New York–Penn league since 1939. But in 2020, in a supposed cost-cutting move, Major League Baseball decided to reduce the number of minor-league teams from 160 to 120 before the 2021 season. The Muckdogs were cut in the contraction, and for the first time in decades, Batavia was at risk of finding itself without a ball club.
Then former minor-league hockey player Robbie Nichols and his wife, Nellie, stepped up and lobbied the city council to allow him to take over the team and have it join the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League. So in the summer of 2021, the boys of summer were back in Batavia. They were now college kids playing summer ball instead of professional minor-leaguers with big-league dreams. But baseball is baseball.
During the 2022 season, Bardenwerper, who served as an infantry officer in Iraq, spent the summer in Batavia, in the hope that “maybe a cure to what ails us can be discovered in the stands of Dwyer Stadium.” Disillusioned by a country “accelerating toward physical and psychic isolation, seductive screens replacing lively bleachers,” he wanted to rekindle his love of both baseball and America.
Bardenwerper found what he was looking for. In the months he spent shuttling from his home in Pittsburgh to Batavia, he befriended a colorful crew of Muckdogs fans. Best friends Betsey Higgins and Ginny Wagner weren’t even sports fans, but they’d drive the 45 miles from Buffalo for every home game because they valued Batavia’s ballpark community. Dr. Ross Fanara, an octogenarian raising two of his great-grandsons, had also found something special at the games, as did his Vietnam-vet good friend Guy Allegretto. Bill Kauffman, a writer and ardent Batavia booster, would sit alongside his mother, Sandra, and his father, Joe, who has been going to Muckdogs games since the 1940s.
An empathetic writer who understands the stakes of what’s happening in Batavia and what it portends for the rest of the country, Bardenwerper is the perfect chronicler of this shrinking slice of Americana. “They were a wonderful example of how the regular nature of these games—the fact that the same people would congregate in the same place with predictable regularity—was conducive to the deepening of relationships,” Bardenwerper observes, “as conversations could linger and develop over multiple games, allowing people to gradually reveal themselves.”
Much has been written about America’s loneliness crisis, but there was no sign of it at Dwyer Stadium. Which makes it all the more infuriating that Major League Baseball, the supposed caretaker of the sport, decided to cut the Muckdogs loose. The fact that Batavia had to battle technocrats and businessmen to save its team is emblematic of our national problem.
The destruction of the minor leagues dovetails with the rise of the Ivy-educated number crunchers who now dominate Major League Baseball’s front offices. If it is to be optimized at every level and lifers such as Muckdogs manager Joey “Skip” Martinez are run out of the game, baseball as we know it might be finished.
When I was a high-school and collegiate player, my teammates didn’t fit in anywhere but were totally at home on the field. I’d hate to see those eccentrics banished because they don’t measure up on some stat freak’s spreadsheet. A player who looks more like an overweight literature professor than an elite athlete might have a nasty curveball for some reason. It makes no sense, but that’s the beauty of baseball—or at least it used to be.
In Batavia, the magic and the mystery and the intricacies of the game still exist. Or as Bill Kauffman said one night in the bleachers: “I wish the game could go on forever.”
Alex Perez is a Miami-based cultural critic and fiction writer
