How Major League Baseball lost its soul

I highly recommend Homestand, Will Bardenwerper’s new book contrasting the community-enhancing qualities of grass-roots baseball with the soulless corporate product that Major League Baseball has become – and it’s not just because I am a central character therein. The book is at once a beautiful portrait of bleacher-level society and a scathingly effective indictment of the automatons who are destroying the American game.

Will spent the summer of 2022 in and around Dwyer Stadium, home of the Batavia Muckdogs, an independent team of college ballplayers. This amateur ball club was the feisty successor to professional teams that had graced our fair city since 1939.

Alas – or should I say enragingly – Major League Baseball exterminated 42 of the then 162 professional minor-league teams in the Covid winter of 2021 with all the sensitivity of an obnoxious drunk squishing a cockroach. Will and I became great friends that summer. I figured I’d be quoted here and there in the book, but I show up so much that my brother emailed me, saying: “I’m 20 pages in and already tired of you.” I can imagine a querulous reader, after exposure to my occasional pronouncements, grumbling, “Jeez this guy has a lot of opinions. Doesn’t he ever shut up?” Or as Neil Young sang, “Is there anything he knows that he ain’t said?”

My brother emailed me, saying: ‘I’m 20 pages in and I’m already tired of you’

Betsey Higgins and Ginny Wagner, best friends who make the 45-minute drive from Buffalo every game because they love the atmosphere and both the comedic and dramatis personae in the stands, are also featured prominently in Homestand.

Given that Will’s first book, The Prisoner in His Palace, a layered and thought-provoking account of the dozen young American servicemen who guarded Saddam Hussein in the final months of the Iraqi tyrant’s life, is currently in pre-production, the Buffalo gals are casting an envisioned Homestand movie.

Betsey has Cate Blanchett as herself, while Ginny has floated Queen Latifah and Da’Vine Joy Randolph to impersonate her. In a fit of madness or kindness they suggested Kevin Costner play me, but they later dialed that back to Michael Shannon. Hey, it’s better than the ghosts of Ernest Borgnine or Marty Feldman.

I kid Betsey and Ginny that come June and a new baseball season, visitors to Dwyer’s third-base bleachers will be monitoring their behavior and measuring it against the characterizations in the book. And who knows where that will lead, as the late Pat Conroy found out.

Conroy’s novel The Great Santini was based on his relationship with his brutal and pitiless father, a Marine pilot and truly miserable martinet. It was then filmed to great effect with Robert Duvall in the lead role. Who does not love Robert Duvall? The actor suffused the irredeemable prick Santini with a gruff and amusing humanity. Conroy reported, to his astonishment, that after the hit movie made his father famous, the old bastard softened considerably, modeling himself after Duvall’s portrayal. Life was imitating art which had imitated life.

However, this is not always replicable. After one of my books featured my wife Lucine as a (thoroughly and accurately!) praiseworthy figure, I sometimes asked her, “Why can’t you be more like that character in the book?” I can report that this line of inquiry does not work.

Homestand has gotten deservedly laudatory notices and endorsements by sluggers ranging from Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) to Ron Shelton (Bull Durham), but Will says that his one dispiriting if instructive revelation has been that “many in the traditional ‘baseball media’ are afraid to touch this book – I suspect out of fear of being seen as too critical of MLB and losing access or otherwise facing adverse professional consequences.”

In a fit of madness or kindness they suggested Kevin Costner play me, but dialed that back to Michael Shannon

It’s rather like reporters for Pravda or Izvestia, circa 1970, declining to interview Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Sure, he’d make for a lively chat, but a guy’s gotta think of his livelihood, after all. Mustn’t take all this reporter jazz too seriously.

I hadn’t realized that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred (an Upstate New York native, to my embarrassment) was quite so sensitive to criticism – or so vindictive. Shelton does say of the man who killed the professional Muckdogs and 41 other teams in small or unfashionable or hardscrabble cities, “Manfred is the Antichrist – and you can quote me on that!” Harsh, maybe, but he is right.

When the sports-writing guild has descended to the point where its ink-stained wretches – I mean inhalers of keyboard dust – won’t call the Antichrist the Antichrist, we’re a long way from Red Smith and Jim Murray, baby.

Homestand is, by my reckoning, the most anti-MLB but pro-sandlot and hick-circuit baseball book ever published. Strike a blow for the true American game and read it.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2025 World edition.