Nostalgic and Piercing, Bardenwerper Examines the Charm and Decline of Small Town Baseball

At first glance, Sewickley resident Will Bardenwerper’s Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America sounds like the kind of book that promises more than it can deliver. Instead, it’s a thorough examination of the state of minor league baseball through the lens of 21st century America (and often vice versa). With critique that peppers the strike zone, the New York Times and Washington Post contributor nails the analysis of where both the sport and our society stand in a warmly crafted book that leans more on characters and perspective than the statistics that enamor the sport’s quants.

Grown out of the various strands of his Army enlistment after 9/11 and an unfulfilling finance gig in Manhattan, Bardenwerper early on wanted to contribute to the “selfless service” of the cops and firefighters who rushed to Ground Zero. His mindset, like many others in those dark days, turns toward defending “some sort of imagined Norman Rockwell Americana … that had always appealed to the romantic in me. This America had, of course, never really existed, yet suddenly felt endangered.” His combat time in Iraq’s deadly Anbar Province lends him a newfound perspective when he returns stateside, only to become disillusioned by the “fracturing of community, an erosion of the societal bonds holding us together.” It’s an issue well documented by others, including social scientist Robert Putnam in his influential book, Bowling Alone.

Yet Bardenwerper, who played two seasons at Princeton, locates his emerging love of America’s pastime in the same place that many diehard fans do: in the streets and backyards of their childhoods, where a game of Wiffle Ball prompts World Series Game 7 heroics, if only in the imagination. Beyond the feeling of genuine community that Bardenwerper finds at no-frills ballparks over the course of a summer, what powers Homestand is his ability to weave a deep understanding of the factors powering baseball’s small-town wane. These range from “soulless virtual contact” in the form of screen time to Major League Baseball’s elimination of 42 minor league teams in 2020. Add the industrial decline in small towns like Elmira, New York, Billings, Montana, and Charleston, West Virginia, where baseball was often woven into the fabric and a dismissiveness of the sport’s grassroots from a league where the average value of a franchise is $2.6 billion. The minor league reduction is a savings that seems minimal in the long run, with the operating costs of a minor league team estimated to be little more than the price of one minimum-salaried Major League player, or about $800,000. New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman puts it more pointedly, in the familiar refrain of shortsighted capitalism: “The bottom line is, this is big business.”

In Bardenwerper’s estimation, MLB wants it both ways, playing up connection to the sport’s rich historical fabric while caring more about raking in the cash from TV and a game day experience that becomes less and less family-friendly with each passing season. What he finds in Batavia, New York, home of the Muckdogs and their now-collegiate roster, becomes less polemical and more emotional. Readers will feel a sense of place and people as they dance with both their circumstance and a desire to bond on an interpersonal level, even when that comes through the seemingly low stakes of the minor leagues. In that, Homestand strides to the plate caring less about something called OBPS+ and caring more about the bleacher regulars who inhabit Dwyer Stadium, like the writerly Bill Kaufmann, owners Robbie and Nellie Nichols, the “Zen-like” Ernie Lawrence, along with best friends Betsey Higgins and Ginny Wagner. It’s a cast of characters who’ll begin to feel like one’s own tribe as the season moves along and Bardenwerper uses the rides back home to his young family in Pittsburgh to reflect.

Homestand will leave readers wanting even more, a testament to a writer who’s both observant and knows how to push the right buttons when he shares what he’s been chasing all these months in a Southern-Tier Rust Belt town: “Those ephemeral moments, so hard to capture, are the ones that satisfy the hunger we all have for acceptance and friendship, a hunger made more acute in a lonelier and more fractious America.” Or, to second the wise Bill Kaufmann who put it this way during the late innings of a less-than memorable blowout at Dwyer Stadium: “I wish the game could go on forever.”