Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America
This book review was originally published on The Journal Gazette on April 4, 2025
The origins of the phrase “hope springs eternal” reside in the work of the 16th century British poet, Alexander Pope, and his “An Essay on Man.” In terms of the public imagination on this side of the Atlantic, however, the origins of that phrase reside in Ernest Thayer’s famed baseball poem, “Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888.”
Despite what challenges may come over the course of a long season, Thayer recounts how hope returns after a long, hard winter when Casey and his fellow boys of summer, young and old, once again step to the plate. Whatever happened last year, every team lives with the hope that claiming the pennant is once again possible this year.
Major leaguers awoke to that hope on March 27. Minor leaguers awoke to that hope last night when the TinCaps welcomed the Lansing Lugnuts for a three-game set.
Most Little Leaguers will need to wait another week with opening day for Georgetown on Friday and St. Joe on April 12.
Part of baseball’s appeal is the manner in which its return occurs in tandem with our emergence from a long winter’s nap. While spring days in Fort Wayne are often less than ideal, they are certainly more appealing than days in late January.
Spring days, however, also harbor the promise that even warmer days will follow in the weeks and months to come.
As Will Bardenwerper notes in “Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America,” the hope publicly manifested by baseball’s return also harbors something even deeper than the desire for warmer days. “Baseball, more than perhaps any other sport due to the sheer number of games, develops a daily rhythm that is reassuring and comforting in its constancy.”
For Bardenwerper, baseball harbors a beauty all its own while also serving as a means to bring light to social ills whose origins may otherwise elude us.
In “Homestand,” Bardenwerper toggles “between an exploration of the business of baseball and the challenges of ordinary Americans in an uncertain economy.” What he offers is not a statistical analysis of those realities but an immersive exploration framed by the season he spent with the Batavia (New York) Muckdogs and the community — despite the challenges it faces — rallying around them.
Bardenwerper, now a resident of Pittsburgh, played baseball in college at Princeton University and found himself working for a financial services firm in New York City when the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, occurred. Unable to continue to make meaning out of the experiences offered by the work to which he thought he might commit his life, Bardenwerper joined the United States Army, serving as an Airborne Ranger infantry officer in Iraq.
His first book is “The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid.”
Amidst the polarization and resultant expressions of belligerence plaguing American culture, many of us have also found making meaning difficult.
As a chronic moderate, I, for one, wondered when to distance myself from friends who cannot go a conversation of length without succumbing to a rant concerning Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Bardenwerper found himself in comparable situations, compounded by questions concerning whether this America is one worthy of the sacrifices he and so many other men and women made.
In the hope of finding America was indeed worthy, Bardenwerper made a pilgrimage to Batavia — a town of about 16,000 persons, 45 miles east of Buffalo and 250 miles north of Pittsburgh. Batavia is home to the Muckdogs, a minor league team with roots dating to 1897.
Despite that history and the support the team receives from the community, Major League Baseball withdrew its relationship with the Muckdogs in 2020, along with about 25% of other minor league teams. The Muckdogs regrouped, joining what is now the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League (PGCBL).
The lively and well-crafted chapters comprising “Homestand” are organized around particular Muckdog home games, following the arc of their season, ranging from opening day in late May until the league championship in early August (you will need to read the book to discover whether they win).
While readers get to know the players and learn of the highlights from the games framing those chapters, each game also serves as a means by which Bardenwerper draws instructive analogies between the social fabric found in Dwyer Stadium to the social fabric found in American culture.
For example, in Chapter 13, “Geneva Red Wings at Batavia Muckdogs, July 3,” Bardenwerper details the mounting successes the Muckdogs experienced as the season crossed the halfway point, positing in the minds of readers that this team may be destined for something special. Bardenwerper also discusses the social fabric emerging among the diverse cast of characters who attend, linger and get to know one another at Muckdog games.
That fabric then becomes a point of contrast for discussing the challenges loneliness poses to many Americans and the manner in which forms of technology — initially touted as means of bringing people together — are worsening those challenges.
As one may wonder whether hope springs eternal at the outset of another season, Bardenwerper’s “Homestand” is a balm for weary souls. While drawing us back to days playing whiffle ball with friends or catch with a parent, it does not do so at the expense of confronting the challenges presently plaguing us.
With each advancing Muckdog game, Bardenwerper nudges us toward opportunities to make community with the people immediately around us. As he found in Batavia, New York, those people may be more interesting than we may think.