Batavia

Tuesday

Bill Kauffman

The story of Vince Maney

Batavia, New York  'Tis spring, and if a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, as Tennyson opined, an older man’s reveries turn — no, not to lawn-mowing — to baseball. Not, in my case, to the grotesque parody of the American game on display in the major leagues, with their automatic extra-inning runners and TV timeouts and $100-plus tickets, but to the sandlot, the high school or college field, the amateur and independent and minor-league ballparks built on a human scale and played in with joy, even in error, by mere mortals.

Maney

Monday

Bill Kauffman

The selfishness of rich socialists

God damn this virus! It’s not so much that I mind the coughing — as a schoolboy I heard every mock-hacking variant of “Cough-Man” — as that Covid’s wretched timing caused me to miss Opening Day for baseball’s Muckdogs for the first time in decades, as well as the premiere of Brothers at Odds, a play about our town’s eccentric nineteenth-century Brisbane family, whose manse faces an uncertain future. I did catch the second performance of both play and ballclub, though, and I can report that greed, bigamy and utopian spider webs are as American as balks and catcher’s interference. Albert and George Brisbane, the titular siblings, were less Cain and Abel than Vain and Stable.

Thursday

Bill Kauffman

What is true in life is true in baseball is true in politics

Batavia, New York For years I was vice president of the Batavia Muckdogs, one of the only community-owned teams in professional baseball. (There is no ownership setup more roundly detested by profit-minded speculators in pro sports.) We teetered on the financial ledge, the poor sister of the New York-Penn League, and it wore on us. Sometimes during a game I would stare at one of the faithful — maybe Alice, a lifelong fan whose bandana covered a head balded by cancer treatments; or Mark, a retarded older man whose imagination, like mine, was coterminous with Dwyer Stadium’s boundaries — and think how crushed he or she would be if we lost our team.

baseball

Wednesday

Bill Kauffman

I am a part of Batavia, New York

This article is the American Life column from The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Batavia, New York, my favorite place in the world, was described by Alexis de Tocqueville on his American tour: ‘Scattered houses then marshes. Rooms built of tree trunks.’ OK, it wasn’t the Frenchman’s most memorable passage. But Tocqueville was more charitable than my landsman John Gardner, the 20th-century novelist who called Batavia a symbol of ‘both spiritual death and the death of civilization’. Gardner, a nomadic academic who had left town years earlier, was responding to the federally funded razing of Batavia’s core in the 1960s under the cruelly misnamed Urban Renewal Program.

batavia new york