
Homestand
Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America
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Narrated by:
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Dan Bittner
About this listen
A poignant memoir exploring small town baseball as a lens into what’s right and wrong with modern America—written by an acclaimed journalist and Army Ranger who, after returning from Iraq to a painfully divided country, rediscovered its core values in the bleachers of a minor league ballpark in Batavia, New York.
"Bardenwerper finds hope in the people and community around a former minor league baseball team.”—Washington Post
"Will reveal more about the prospects for America than 100 news stories about politics, and will be a lot more fun.”—James Fallows, bestselling co-author of Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America
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.
©2025 Will Bardenwerper (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“[Bardenwerper] recounts what was lost in Batavia when minor-league baseball left town—and what was found when a new squad bearing the old name was established in its place.... This is a story about sporting competition, but really it is a tale about community.”—Wall Street Journal
“A romantic look at the magic of small-town baseball.... In Homestand, journalist Will Bardenwerper finds hope in the people and community around a former minor league baseball team.”—Washington Post
“An informative, often emotional account of small-town baseball and 'the special group of people' on the field, behind the scenes, and in the stands 'who help keep it alive one summer at a time.'”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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Performance
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Larger than Life. In the history of American sports, rare is the athlete who fits that description better than Don Drysdale. On the mound, the towering six-foot-five righthander intimidated National League hitters for more than a decade, amassing career totals of 209 wins, 2,486 strikeouts . . . and hitting 154 batters, a stat he lead the major leagues in four times. Off the field, Drysdale's personality dominated every room he walked into. With a smile as immense as the sun, Drysdale's contemporaries included Frank Sinatra and Howard Cosell.
By: Mark Whicker
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Trespassers at the Golden Gate
- A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco
- By: Gary Krist
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck. Reaching under her veil, she drew a small pistol and aimed it directly at a well-dressed man sitting quietly with his wife and children. The woman fired a single bullet into his chest. “I did it and I don’t deny it,” she said when arrested shortly thereafter. “He ruined me and my daughter.”
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Story of a City
- By Suzanna on 04-29-25
By: Gary Krist
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The Fifteen
- Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America
- By: William Geroux
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The revelatory true story of the long-forgotten POW camps for German soldiers erected in hundreds of small U.S. towns during World War II, and the secret Nazi killings that ensnared fifteen brave American POWs in a high-stakes showdown.
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Very Interesting and a Great Book
- By Marissa on 05-02-25
By: William Geroux
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Yankees, Typewriters, Scandals, and Cooperstown
- A Baseball Memoir
- By: Bill Madden, Buck Showalter - foreword
- Narrated by: Gregory Abbey
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Before he'd covered dozens of World Series; before he'd written about countless hirings, firings, superstars, and scandals, Bill Madden was a cub reporter on one of his first assignments at Yankee Stadium—and manager Ralph Houk had just gone out of his way to spit tobacco juice all over Madden's shoes. “That’s Ralph’s way with rookie writers he doesn’t recognize,” came the explanation. “He doesn’t mean anything by it.”
By: Bill Madden, and others
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The Man Nobody Killed
- Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York
- By: Elon Green
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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At twenty-five years old, Michael Stewart was a young Black aspiring artist, deejay, and model, looking to make a name for himself in the vibrant downtown art scene of the early 1980’s New York City. On September 15, 1983, he was brutally beaten by New York City Transit Authority police for allegedly tagging a 14th Street subway station wall. Witnesses reported officers beating him with Billy clubs and choking him with a nightstick. Stewart arrived at Bellevue Hospital hog-tied with no heartbeat and died after thirteen days in a coma.
By: Elon Green
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1978
- Baseball and America in the Disco Era
- By: David Krell
- Narrated by: David Krell
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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From spring training to the World Series, 1978 gave baseball fans one of the sport's greatest seasons, full of legendary moments like the battle between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox for the American League East pennant, Gaylord Perry's three thousandth strikeout, Tom Seaver's only career no-hitter, Willie McCovey's five hundredth home run, and Pete Rose's marathon forty-four-game hitting streak.
By: David Krell
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Rot
- An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
- By: Padraic X. Scanlan
- Narrated by: Stephen Hogan
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate. In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation.
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Really great work of history
- By Anonymous User on 04-12-25
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Tales from the Dugout
- 1,001 Humorous, Inspirational and Wild Anecdotes from Minor League Baseball
- By: Tim Hagerty
- Narrated by: Mark Smeby
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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A wild bull on the field, a fly ball caught by a train conductor, a pitcher taking the mound barefoot—Minor League Baseball has been played across the country in cities large and small for more than a century, and there are thousands of entertaining and improbable stories to tell from it.
By: Tim Hagerty
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I Felt the Cheers
- The Remarkable Silent Life of Curtis Pride
- By: Curtis Pride, Doug Ward, Cal Ripken Jr. - foreword
- Narrated by: Arnell Powell
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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On a September night in Montreal in 1993, Curtis Pride got his first Major League hit, prompting a long, emotional standing ovation from the crowd of 45,757 fans. Profoundly deaf since birth, Pride couldn’t hear their thunderous applause. But as the cheers grew louder and more insistent, he realized he was feeling those vibrations within his chest—an undeniable acknowledgment of an extraordinary achievement.
By: Curtis Pride, and others
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He Leadeth Me
- An Extraordinary Testament of Faith
- By: Walter J. Ciszek S.J., Daniel L. Flaherty S.J.
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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He Leadeth Me is a deeply personal story of one man’s spiritual odyssey and the unflagging faith which enabled him to survive the ordeal that wrenched his body and spirit to near collapse. Captured by a Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a “Vatican spy,” Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent some twenty-three agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. In He Leadeth Me, he relates how it was only through an utter reliance on God’s will that he managed to endure.
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How to follow the Will of God
- By Mike Davies on 05-02-25
By: Walter J. Ciszek S.J., and others
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Mets Stories I Only Tell My Friends
- By: Art Shamsky, Matthew Silverman, Howie Rose - foreword
- Narrated by: Barry Abrams
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Art Shamsky, 1969 New York Met and noted author, shares with listeners stories and anecdotes from his fifty-year association with the New York Mets. Through stories of varying lengths, listeners will be privy to behind-the-scenes and first-hand accounts of the New York Mets from lovable losers to impossible winners in 1969, and beyond, including stories about today's players.
By: Art Shamsky, and others
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Family Romance
- John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
- By: Jean Strouse
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Jean Strouse's Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career—and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.
By: Jean Strouse
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True to Our Native Land (Second Edition)
- An African American New Testament Commentary
- By: Gay L. Byron - editor, Emerson B. Powery - editor, Brian K. Blount - editor
- Narrated by: Julienne Irons, Leon Nixon
- Length: 34 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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True to Our Native Land is a pioneering commentary on the New Testament that sets biblical interpretation firmly in the context of African American experience and concern. In this second edition, the scholarship is cutting-edge, updated, and expanded to be in tune with African American culture, education, and churches.
By: Gay L. Byron - editor, and others
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The Franklin Stove
- An Unintended American Revolution
- By: Joyce E. Chaplin
- Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The biggest revolution in Benjamin Franklin’s lifetime was made to fit in a fireplace. Assembled from iron plates like a piece of flatpack furniture, the Franklin stove became one of the era's most iconic consumer products, spreading from Pennsylvania to England, Italy, and beyond. It was more than just a material object, however—it was also a hypothesis. Franklin was proposing that, armed with science, he could invent his way out of a climate crisis: a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, when unusually bitter winters sometimes brought life to a standstill.
By: Joyce E. Chaplin
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A Map to Paradise
- By: Susan Meissner
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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With her name on the Hollywood blacklist and her life on hold, starlet Melanie Cole has little choice in company. There is her next-door neighbor, Elwood, but the screenwriter’s agoraphobia allows for just short chats through open windows. He’s her sole confidante, though, as she and her housekeeper, Eva, an immigrant from war-torn Europe, rarely make conversation. Then one early morning Melanie and Eva spot Elwood’s sister-in-law and caretaker, June, digging in his beloved rose garden. After that they don’t see Elwood at all anymore.
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Not my favorite from my favorite author.
- By Ginger on 03-28-25
By: Susan Meissner
What listeners say about Homestand
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mark Wilt
- 05-02-25
Great topic, Perfect narration
As a fan of baseball, the story was compelling and accurate. But the narration of the story was perfect. I've turned off a lot of stories because of the "reading" of the book. This one was like I was sitting in the room with the author.
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- BeagleMom
- 04-09-25
Hit the nail on the head
I loved how the author described how baseball has taken the small town atmosphere out of the game. Yes, I’ll still love and watch my Braves and A’s, but in the back of my mind I’ll remember how my beloved game is only a big business.
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- Anonymous User
- 05-04-25
Not Bull Durham nor The Circus of Baseball
This book starts very slowly and was a gripes. It was not as depressing as East of Eden but was walking on that path. It did get better as it progressed with a few shining passages. Gripefest not gripes
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