Journalist Will Bardenwerper joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new book, Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America, which explores the consequences of Major League Baseball cutting 40 affiliated minor league teams, each one only as expensive as an average Major League salary. He explains how the accessibility and affordability of minor league baseball has made it a unique gathering point for working-class communities like the one in Batavia, New York, where Bardenwerper followed the local team, the Muckdogs, for a season. He celebrates the traditions and resilience of the Muckdogs fans and owners, who revived the team after it was eliminated as a minor league franchise. He also reads from Homestand.
To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, and Moss Terrell.
Will Bardenwerper
Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America • “Minor Threat: MLB puts the farm system out to pasture” by Will Bardenwerper |Harper’s Magazine • The Prisoner In His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid
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Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 3, Episode 4: Wild Ecologies: So Go the Salmon, So Goes the World: Tucker Malarkey, Will Bardenwerper, and Stan Brewer In Conversation • Moneyball by Michael Lewis • Field of Dreams (1989) • Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella
EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH WILL BARDENWERPER
V.V. Ganeshananthan: So Ernie Lawrence, who we’ve discussed, appears in that passage, and he’s in the bleachers reading a biography of Stalin, as one does at a baseball game. It’s the capacious space that these ballparks are making for people who are not always lonely but may be sometimes lonely, not exactly loners but maybe, as you said, not the most extroverted. There’s a pleasant in-betweenness and there’s something profoundly American about reading a book, educating yourself at a baseball game. I was reading this, and I was comforted to know that I’m not the only person who takes a book to a sporting event. Is that part of the peace you’re talking about, that space to educate yourself and take some time to do something like read a book at a baseball game?
Will Bardenwerper: There’s a lot going on there. There is something about the pace of baseball, and I wasn’t the first one to observe this or write about it, but it’s different from football or hockey or basketball, where it’s this feverish, breakneck thing. You’re not going to have a leisurely conversation at a hockey game or a basketball game. There’s just too much going on, the action’s too fast. With baseball, particularly at this level, you can have conversations that last for games, for weeks. You talk to someone for a few innings, then you may go your separate way, and then the next night, you run into the same people, and you pick up where you left off. That’s what’s unique about baseball at this level, as opposed to the Major League level.
I think too, it’s worth noting that, because it’s so cheap—it’s $99 for a season ticket— because it’s logistically so easy to get to—it’s nestled in a residential neighborhood— you have 80-year-olds. I mean, it’s difficult for an 80-year-old to get to Yankee Stadium, much less to park, to get to seats up in the upper deck. That’s beyond the capability of probably a lot of people that age here. I write about Bill Kauffman’s parents, who are in their mid-80s. They go every night because it’s two blocks away. They walk in and they’re in their seats five minutes later, and they can leave as soon as the sun goes down and it begins to get chilly. And there’s an intergenerational element to it. For that same reason, you have grandparents, their kids and their kids’ kids all together. There aren’t really that many places where that occurs in American life today, besides maybe Thanksgiving dinner. Here you have this happening every night. It’s oftentimes the same people, and that contributes to that ability to have these relationships evolve and mature over time. There’s a leisurely element to it that you wouldn’t find surrounded by 70,000 screaming strangers at a Major League sporting event.
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