Minor League Baseball

My first summer back in my hometown was a dreary affair — COVID closures, canceled parties and paranoid friends diminished the pleasures of small-town living. But all across the country, the end of the pandemic has brought back one of the joys of living in a non-metropolitan city like mine: minor league baseball. Sure, it’s great to be able to watch the MLB again on split-screens at the bar — and if you’re really lucky, to pay $12 for a hot dog at a major league stadium — but the joys of the minors are all their own. Where else can you watch your very own neighborhood kids dress up in Styrofoam foodstuff costumes to compete in increasingly complex and obscure contests between each inning? With a merry-go-round, fireworks, the smell of popcorn in the air and the sound of P!

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.