Capitalism, Baseball, Community, and Loss

Homestand is a book about baseball, and the author is a Mets fan. Thus, Homestand is a book about loss.

It’s not only about loss, of course, and the Mets are only in the background. The 2022 Batavia Muckdogs, the centerpiece of Homestand, win most of their games, including an exciting playoff run.

And Homestand isn’t only about baseball, either. It’s also about capitalism and community—and about the complicated relationship between the two.

Batavia is a Rust Belt town in Upstate New York, and so you can probably guess some of the book’s themes. The railroads aren’t the business they once were. The Interstate bypassed the downtown. Industry fled. The local grocery store, the Dipson Theater, and the Dagwood Restaurant all fell to a "ghastly mall" as local writer Bill Kauffman puts it. Homestand has its older, suffering working-class white heroes with a fondness for Donald Trump that the author finds regrettable.

There are big corporate bad guys in this book, such as the Big Box chain stores and Ogden Media, which the author describes as "profiting from the gutting of local newspapers." But the biggest and baddest of the bad guys is Major League Baseball, which announced in 2020 that it would terminate 40 of its 160 minor-league affiliates.

For Batavia that meant that their beloved Muckdogs (in the farm system of the Miami Marlins) would be killed. Homestand begins on a dark and cold December day with two diehard fans, Betsey and Ginny, sitting in the empty grandstands, lamenting the unbearable loss of the Muckdogs. Neither woman was much of a sports fan, but both had made the bleachers at Batavia’s Dwyer Stadium the center of their summer.

This loss, however, was partly undone when Robbie Nichols, a hustling businessman, and his wife Nellie brought a college summer-league team to Batavia and named it the Muckdogs.

And right here, when these two capitalists—"tough businesspeople," Bardenwerper calls them—save summer for Batavia, we come face-to-face with the tension of Homestand.

Homestand is, yes, another book about the destruction capitalism has wreaked on the Rust Belt and, in fact, on the entire American social fabric. The good life, as depicted by Bardenwerper, is the antithesis of modern capitalism.

The good life is playing wiffle ball as a child; it is sitting in the bleachers with Bill Kauffman and a dozen other regulars; it is spending a bit extra for a cup of coffee at the local independent coffee shop with some truly unpleasant regulars; it is taking in a baseball game played by 20-year-olds who are not good enough to play professionally.

The summer evenings in the bleachers of Dwyer Stadium are slow, inefficient, often uncompetitive—in fact, when the playoffs come around, the energy in the stands during the Muckdogs’ exciting wins strikes some of the most faithful fans as somehow unnerving or ill-fitting.

Everyone knows the vision of America as the bustling, striving, free-market nation that shoots the moon. From this perspective, the slowness, inefficiency, and uncompetitiveness of an amateur baseball operation are downright un-American. But it’s all quintessentially American if you instead think of America as small towns, neighbors, volunteering, and all that Norman Rockwell or Alexis de Tocqueville stuff.

Homestand appreciates and wrestles with both visions, and argues, in effect, that we need some oases from the ruthless efficiency and constant disruption that capitalism provides—and that baseball ought to be one such oasis. Bardenwerper doesn’t want to deny baseball owners the chance to pursue profits, but he asks, "Does an enterprise that purports to be part of the fabric of America have a responsibility to prevent that fabric from fraying?"

Killing the minor league teams in Batavia and 39 other small cities was, moreover, wrecking a rare institution of civil society in a culture that is increasingly alienated, atomized, and isolated.

"Bottom line is this is big business," Yankees exec Brian Cashman is quoted saying in Homestand. "This should be run like a Wall Street boardroom." Dwyer Stadium is run like a business, from the front gates to the popcorn stand, but not like Wall Street.

"Popcorn Bob" is a Dwyer mainstay, popping and hawking that ballpark classic snack. Bob obviously does it for money, but not just money: He derives great pleasure from his minor fame, gushing that townspeople spot him out and about, yelling "Hey, Popcorn Bob!" Bardenwerper can’t help but compare Bob’s very personal, sticky, sweaty, friendly popcorn stand with the "frictionless" economy MLB tries to create in the stadiums.

The author’s laments about capitalism and modernity run throughout the book, but they never cross the line into becoming too preachy or ideological. The tone, instead, is melancholy, which is the proper tone for both baseball and capitalism.

The serious baseball fan will, at times, wish for better sportswriting. For instance the most dramatic hit of the season (I won’t spoil it here) is recounted in a humdrum way. But still, any reader with a heart for baseball is apt to start crying on Page 1, and to cry again on the last page, with plenty of misty eyes in between.

The book’s cover depicts a conference on the pitcher’s mound at Dwyer, amid a glorious summer sunset. It’s probably the most fitting cover photo I’ve ever seen on a nonfiction work.

The conference—the coach, the catcher, and the infielder talking to the pitcher, while a runner stands on base talking to the base coach—captures the languid pace of summer baseball. The sunset as seen from the bleachers is a recurring theme in the book. Sometimes you would think Bardenwerper, Kauffman, and the rest went to Dwyer not to catch baseball but to catch sunsets.

Sunsets are fleeting. Summer is fleeting. The beauty of these things is inextricable from their temporariness.

One backdrop of this book is the Mets’ 2022 season, because many Batavians are, like Bardenwerper, Mets fans. The most prickly, unlikable character in the book wears his Mets cap at all times.

Bardenwerper doesn’t provide the details of the Mets’ run that summer, but it’s a fitting backdrop. The Mets would win 101 games that season, yet didn’t win the division—and they got eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. The 2022 Mets saw a never-before-and-never-again season of near perfection by their closer Edwin Diaz. It saw the sunset of the Mets’ career of Jacob DeGrom, a Hall-of-Fame-level hurler whose brief bloom was spectacular.

These performances and runs were so beautiful, so exciting, so perfect that every fan wanted to hold onto them. But you can’t hold onto a sunset. You can’t hold onto a season. Summer always slips away.

You also can’t hold onto Main Street, onto the Dagwood Restaurant, onto the factory job your father had. You can’t hold onto anything in this world. That doesn’t mean you can’t squeeze it all so tightly to your heart that it hurts. Homestead is a beautiful work of melancholy, because it’s a heartfelt effort to hold onto beauty in a world of loss.

Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America
by Will Bardenwerper
Doubleday, 320 pp., $30

Timothy P. Carney is the senior columnist at the Washington Examiner, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a lifelong Mets fan.

The post Capitalism, Baseball, Community, and Loss appeared first on .