A Compelling Case for Small Town Baseball
The survival of this ecosystem of minor league baseball, like an America that gets along because of shared ideals, is imperiled. He lovingly describes people who rely on baseball for their moral and mental health.
Book Review: “Homestand”
by John W. Miller, The Daily Yonder
April 11, 2025
In American towns, before air conditioning and television turned suburban homes into social coffins, minor league baseball anchored the evenings of summer. For most of the 20th century, the best place to be on a hot July night was the local ballyard. There was a cool breeze there, and at home no baseball to see on TV. The biggest news in town, it was said, was if the bank was robbed, or the local nine won the pennant.
The peak of this trend was in the late 1940s. Attendance peaked at nearly 40 million. In 1949, there were 448 teams in 59 leagues. There was demand because the formalized version of baseball, which evolved from ancient village ball games, was only a century old then, and it felt fresh, and vital to the American project. Young men home from fighting in Europe and Asia wanted to play, or at the very least, to watch.
There was supply because big league teams had embraced pioneering general manager Branch Rickey’s philosophy of “quality out of quantity,” signing as many ballplayers and supporting as many minor league clubs as they could afford, in the hopes of generating star players via a process of Darwinian evolution.
Much has changed since those glory days cemented minor league baseball in the American psyche. There are now only 120 professional minor league teams in the United States. ☘ The contemporary place of minor league baseball in American life has been put under a microscope in Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America, Will Bardenwerper’s charming, essential new book about the 2022 season he spent with the Muckdogs, an amateur minor league team in Batavia, a town of 15,000 in Western New York state. (Disclosure: I also write about baseball and talked to Bardenwerper for his book.)
The Batavia team is amateur because, while the demand still exists for professional minor league baseball, the supply does not. Eager to cut costs and streamline its development process, in 2021 Major League Baseball contracted the number of minor league affiliated teams to 120 from 162. Instead of quality out of quantity, the guiding philosophy of big league clubs is now to sign a smaller number of players out of high school and college, and spend more resources training them.
One of the places to lose its affiliated minor league team in 2021 was Batavia. Teams don’t want to be shouldered with managing decaying stadiums in declining Rust Belt towns – part of the shift in America of wealth and capital away from the hinterlands to richer, more coastal cities. “This isn’t just a story about baseball,” writes Bardenwerper. “This is a story about America, and where we go from here. We have long lamented the closing of the mills and the factories in these small and midsize cities all over the country. Now the ballpark, that friendly gathering place where relationships are nourished over the course of summer in the grandstands, is under siege.”
Batavia was now faced with losing baseball. Luckily, a local entrepreneur founded a team that joined an amateur summer league. The players pay a fee to play in nice stadiums, in front of crowds and the occasional scout. If one really shines, there’s still a chance he could be signed to a pro contract. In America, from t-ball and up, there is always somebody ready to make a buck off the dreams of young athletes seeking to enter the glamorous world of professional sports. Batavia’s ballplayers, it is clear, are underdogs: one pitcher was raised by grandparents in Florida, who make sure never to miss games, which are broadcast on YouTube.
What makes Bardenwerper’s book special, and even uplifting, is the reporting. Hanging out at Batavia's Dwyer Stadium, capacity 2,600, he finds a community of people who go to the ballpark to see old friends and make new ones, to gossip and eat, and to see some hardball. He finds “the real magic” in “the bleachers, among the fans … in the shared food, drink, and intimate conversation of those seemingly meaningless regular-season games of midsummer, where gathering together on a regular basis to cheer on the Muckdogs made everyone’s life just a little bit better. 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.”
He lovingly describes people who rely on baseball for their moral and mental health. He finds a woman keeping score because “she enjoyed how methodical the ritual was, like a puzzle that kept her engaged for every pitch. Such was her devotion to scorekeeping that she used to grow anxious leaving her seats to grab something at the concession stand for fear she would miss some of the action and fail to record it in her notebook,” recounts Bardenwerper. It’s not just in Batavia. In Elmira, New York, which also has a team in the league, he meets a 93-year-old Korean War veteran named Herb Tipton, who’d been going to games since 1973. “For decades his summer evenings had revolved around Elmira baseball, and he could almost always be found quietly taking it all in, a serene smile on his face.”
As Bardenwerper reports, the survival of this ecosystem of minor league baseball, like an America which gets along because of shared ideals, is imperiled. Stadiums are managed like shopping malls. One holding company owns dozens of minor league teams. “Bottom line is this is big business,” said Yankees general manager Brian Cashman in an oft-quoted 2015 interview. “This should be run like a Wall Street boardroom where you pursue assets.”
There is an antidote to this falling apart, which Bardenwerper touches on when he describes playing catch with his son. That cure is to get involved with baseball yourself. Play. Coach. Watch. Support your local high school or college team. People have been predicting the demise of baseball since the 19th century, and, to be sure, leagues, teams and markets have moved, died, and, as in Batavia, been reborn in new ways.
Homestand reminds us of the beauty of a game bringing people in small-town America together in the most hospitable of seasons. That should be enough to get you outside to play catch.
John W. Miller is a high school baseball coach in Pittsburgh and author of the New York Times bestseller The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented and Reinvented Baseball.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
James F. Stephens, J.D.
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