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A poignant memoir exploring small town baseball as a lens into whats right and wrong with modern Americawritten by an acclaimed journalist and Army Ranger who, after returning from Iraq to a painfully divided country, rediscovered its core values in the bleachers of a minor league ballpark in Batavia, New York.
What happens when a minor league teamthe heart and soul of a Rust Belt town in western New Yorkis shut down by the billionaires who run Major League Baseball?
Batavia, New Yorkbetween Rochester and Buffalohosted its first professional baseball game in 1897. Despite decades of deindustrialization and evaporating middle-class jobs, the Batavia Muckdogs endured. When Major League Baseball cravenly shut them down in 2020along with forty-one other minor league teamsthe town fought back, reviving the Muckdogs as a summer league team comprised of college players. As MLB considers further cuts and private equity buys up what remains, the mom-and-pop operations once prevalent in baseball are endangered. But for now, the sights and sounds of local baseball live on in Bataviacheap draft beer and hot dogs, starry-eyed kids seeking autographs, and breathtaking summer sunsets.
With a vibrant, unforgettable cast of charactersfrom a librarian and her best friend whose relationship deepens with every crepuscular hour they spend together in the bleachers, to the former hockey brawler-turned team owner who greets regulars while working the concession stand, to the iconoclastic writer with a contagious love for his struggling hometownBardenwerpers Homestand exposes the beating heart of small town America, friends and neighbors coming together as the crack of the bat echoes in the summer twilight.
