A poignant memoir exploring small town baseball as a lens into what's right and wrong with modern America-written by an acclaimed journalist who went from Princeton to U.S. Army Ranger School to Iraq in search of the core values he ended up finding in a minor league stadium in Batavia, New York.
What happens when a minor league team-that has been the heart and soul of a modest upstate New York town-is shut down by the billionaires who run Major League Baseball?
Batavia, New York-between Rochester and Buffalo-was a bastion of small town baseball where the professional game had been played uninterrupted since 1897. Many jobs have evaporated or gone overseas, but its good families haven't, and one remaining jewel of Batavia is the Muckdogs' quirky ballpark that attracts a hefty portion of the local population from June to August every year.
In Homestand, acclaimed author and journalist Will Bardenwerper explores the question 'What is baseball?,' and uses that as a lens to explore 'What is America today.' Introducing a vibrant and unforgettable cast of characters, Bardenwerper exposes the beating heart of small-town America and its love of baseball-even as Major League Baseball is on a little-disguised mission to control the sport from the very top, closing down many minor league teams across the country. The Batavia Muckdogs were one of the victims of MLB contraction-shut down unceremoniously in 2021. But the town fought back and a new version of the Muckdogs arose, playing in a summer league comprised of mostly college players and prospects. The town rallied, and the sounds and sights of local baseball on summer nights continued. Tickets and draft beer and hot dogs were still affordable. Kids were still starry-eyed and seeking autographs before games.
Meanwhile, in other minor leagues, the mom-and-pop advertisements in center field are replaced by corporate ad sales controlled by New York marketing managers, and locally printed game programs and neighborhood teens working the ticket windows are replaced by convenient 'scan your ticket through the app at the kiosk and click the link to see today's lineup and pop-up advertisements from Google.'… But at the heart of Homestand, Bardenwerper searches the back roads of America for things that are still good and pure, for the crack of a bat in a small town under the summer stars-and he finds it.
A book that, in the haunting tradition of In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song, lifts away the top layer of evil and finds complexity beneath, this is the bizarre tale of twelve young American soldiers who are deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2006. Rather than fight the enemy in combat, the men are unexpectedly assigned to guard the country's notorious leader-Saddam Hussein-in the months leading to his execution.
Living alongside, and caring for, their "high value detainee" in a former palace dubbed The Rock and regularly transporting him to his raucous trial, many of the men begin questioning some of their most basic assumptions.
Thoroughly researched and provocative, The Prisoner in His Palace contrasts two very different Saddams: the defiant, younger man who uses torture and murder as tools, and the older man who proves affectionate, charming, and unexpectedly courageous in the face of looming death. In this artfully constructed narrative, Saddam, the "man without a conscience," manages to get everyone around him to examine theirs. Many of those who bid goodbye to Saddam will be forever changed by the experience, and we wonder if we ourselves will.
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