Written by Will Bardenwerper
Will Bardenwerper served as an Airborne Ranger-qualified infantry officer in Iraq and came on our Veterans Breakfast Club program in 2023 to talk about Saddam Hussein’s last days in 2006, a story captured in his book The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid.
Will has a new book coming out about a non-military subject, but one related to his deep love of our country and the sense of community so important to military service. Below, Will talks about his new baseball book and why he wrote it.
My new book HOMESTAND: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America tells the story of Major League Baseball’s elimination of 42 minor league teams a few years ago, and the impact this will have on communities that in some cases have hosted these teams for nearly a century. It also tells the story of rebirth, and how one small city in western New York resurrected baseball in form of a collegiate summer league team
In 2007, I returned to America after a violent year deployed to Iraq’s Anbar Province, my infantry battalion of roughly 650 soldiers suffering high casualties with 16 killed and nearly 200 wounded. Although I was fortunate not to suffer from the typical manifestations of PTSD, still, as years passed, I found myself increasingly demoralized by a country that seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
Perhaps what troubled me the most was the fracturing of community, an erosion of the societal bonds holding us together. And I saw that epitomized in what Major League Baseball was doing.
As I read about some of the small towns on MLB’s chopping block — working-class communities like Pulaski, Virginia; Elizabethton, Tennessee; Bluefield, West Virginia; Williamsport, Pennsylvania; and Batavia, New York — the decision by billionaire major league owners to extinguish these community ball clubs, some of the few remaining places where people could still find happiness and connection, for affordable prices, as they had for generations, merely to save the equivalent of one major league minimum salary, struck me as emblematic of much of what was wrong with today’s America.
It occurred to me that maybe a partial cure can be discovered in the stands of Dwyer Stadium. In the wake of MLB’s cuts, Batavia refused to surrender baseball, rallying behind the creation of a new Muckdogs club, made up of amateur players competing in a summer collegiate league.
Would baseball in Batavia endure, or would it collapse and hasten the city’s slide toward senescence, like so many of its Rust Belt neighbors?
Would the life of a vibrant community still course through Dwyer’s grandstand, a place where the bleachers bend under modern-day forces, but, thanks to a rare local effort to save their team, have yet to break?
In HOMESTAND, I tried to communicate what makes these evenings at the ballpark so special, for the fans I got to know, and for myself, providing a welcome sense of serenity in a society where community bonds can sometimes feel endangered by political battles and by more people spending more time online than enjoying the company of others in person.
The book can be purchased on Amazon (or Barnes and Noble): https://www.amazon.com/Homestand-Small-Baseball-Fight-America/dp/0385549652
