Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Doubleday Books, and author Will Bardenwerper for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

I wasn’t exposed to minor league baseball until we moved to New Hampshire. Back in New York, my local team was the NY Mets, whom I still adore. There were no Coney Island Cyclones or even Long Island Ducks while I was growing up. By taking my kids to New Hampshire Fisher Cats games, I found I enjoy minor league baseball at least as much as I used to enjoy those games as a kid at Shea Stadium. At the same time, I’ve seen the toll globalization and private equity have taken on small communities. As I’ve traveled through New England geocaching, there are far too many towns that grew up around factories which have closed in the last 50 years, leaving the towns slowly dying.

I thought Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America would fit right into this niche for me, and I was right for the most part. In 2021, Major League Baseball chose to eliminate a good chunk of its farm system. Many towns lost the teams that once played baseball there. Author Will Bardenwerper focuses on the community of Batavia, New York, which sits between Buffalo and Rochester. The town had a team known as the Muckdogs, which they lost in the contraction of the farm system. There’s still baseball being played there, though, as a summer collegiate league filled the vacuum of the loss of the minor league team.

Bardenwerper spent one summer with the Muckdogs, getting to know the owners of the small club as well as the staff, players, and fans. In his book, he shows how important the games are to the local culture, providing a place where people can get together and root, root, root for the home team despite any other differences they might have at other times.

There’s a great deal of affection in Batavia for this team, even as the town tries to reinvent itself. It’s succeeding better than some other communities Bardenwerper visits with the team. It might get a little more traffic than those towns do, being closer to the interstate, but there’s a big heart in the town as well. Bardenswerper seems to tread a line during the book, trying not to be biased in terms of politics, but it bleeds through at times. How can it not, when a big part of the problem is that the government we currently have serves as a corporate oligarchy? Many of these people in these small towns continually vote for people who are against their best interests.

Which brings me to my one complaint with the book. In trying to be nice to both sides, Bardenwerper fails to call out the problem and even makes excuses for it.

This is the same sentiment that says: both sides are the same. I get not wanting to potentially alienate a good part of your audience, and it’s really not Bardenwerper’s place to educate them that they are voting against their best interests. However, if that was the tack he was going to take, he should have left politics out of it altogether. He speaks again and again of “private equity” and what these teams run more like corporations have taken from towns like Batavia, but he never connects the dots to say that is exactly what they are voting for over and over again.

Bardenwerper hammers home the point that Major League Baseball is too focused on statistics and analytics. Moneyball might have been a good idea for the teams that couldn’t afford the large payrolls that some teams have, but it has taken over baseball to the point that it’s everything. There won’t be another superstar like Mike Piazza drafted in the 62nd round of the draft. The teams no longer have the depth for those players, and if they’re not putting up the numbers in high school or college, they are going to be ignored.

I enjoyed reading about the Muckdogs and their fans. There are a lot of people who contribute to the team purely for the love of the game. That’s something a community rallies around, with kids running the bases and great memories for families being created. You can’t measure that on a balance sheet. I ended up wishing we had a team like this in my area. I think it would go a long way to bringing communities together.

Overall, I liked the book quite a bit. There were a few times it seemed to drag, but the point is clear that Major League Baseball isn’t thinking about where the next generation of fans will come from when they pull baseball from various communities. Financing a minor league team for one season costs less than most baseball players’ salaries for that year. It’s all part of money and profit mattering above all else, and this greed has harmed our National Pastime. If you’re a fan of the game who laments what’s missing from the sport, with the players and owners only seeing dollar signs, I think this book will feel refreshing. I just wish he’d either followed through on the political thoughts or left them out completely.