Will Bardenwerper's recently published Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America, is getting rave reviews across the nation. Bardenwerper's book looks at the impact of the contraction of Batavia's minor league baseball team, the Muckdogs, on the town and its residents. Zoom with the author as he shares his thoughts on community, baseball, and rediscovering our core values in a small town's baseball bleachers.

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FROM THE PUBLISHER: What happens when a minor league team—the heart and soul of a Rust Belt town in western New York—is shut down by the billionaires who run Major League Baseball?

Batavia, New York—between Rochester and Buffalo—hosted 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 2020—along with forty-one other minor league teams—the 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 Batavia—cheap draft beer and hot dogs, starry-eyed kids seeking autographs, and breathtaking summer sunsets.

With a vibrant, unforgettable cast of characters—from 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 hometown—Bardenwerper’s 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.

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This is an online event. Event URL will be sent via registration email. Sponsored by the Pittsford Community Library's Author Series.