Homestand

A poignant memoir exploring small town baseball as a lens into what’s right and wrong with modern America--written by an acclaimed journalist who went from Princeton to U.S. Army Ranger School to Iraq in search of the core values he ended up finding in a minor league stadium in Batavia, New York. What happens when a minor league team--that has been the heart and soul of a modest upstate New York town--is shut down by the billionaires who run Major League Baseball? Batavia, New York--between Rochester and Buffalo--was a bastion of small town baseball where the professional game had been played uninterrupted since 1897. Many jobs have evaporated or gone overseas, but its good families haven’t, and one remaining jewel of Batavia is the Muckdogs’ quirky ballpark that attracts a hefty portion of the local population from June to August every year.; In Meanwhile, in other minor leagues, the mom-and-pop advertisements in center field are replaced by corporate ad sales controlled by New York marketing managers, and locally printed game programs and neighborhood teens working the ticket windows are replaced by convenient "scan your ticket through the app at the kiosk and click the link to see today''s lineup and pop-up advertisements from Google."… But at the heart of <Homestand<, Bardenwerper searches the back roads of America for things that are still good and pure, for the crack of a bat in a small town under the summer stars--and he finds it....

Auteur
WILL BARDENWERPER has contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s and other outlets and is the author of The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid. He served as an Airborne Ranger–qualified infantry officer in Iraq and was awarded a Combat Infantryman Badge and Bronze Star. Before working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, he received a B.A. from Princeton and M.A. from Johns Hopkins University.