Will Bardenwerper is the author of “Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America.”
As a D.C. native and lifelong Capitals fan now living in Penguins country, this November’s game in Pittsburgh jumped out at me for the chance to see one of the final matchups between future Hall of Famers Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby. Excited, I bought tickets to take my 8-year-old son, Bates, a “mite” hockey player just beginning to fall in love with the sport.
I did so despite mounting frustration with major professional sports, in which ticket and concession prices have outpaced inflation by orders of magnitude, while the in-person experience grows more corporate and homogenous.
The evening got off to a rough start, stuck in traffic approaching PPG Paints Arena before finding a parking garage that charged $40. After scanning our $50 tickets, I bought a souvenir puck and ice cream for Bates, along with a Labatt for me, pushing the total spent to nearly $200 before we had even found our seats. Making our way through swarms of fans clad in Crosby and Evgeni Malkin jerseys, we finally crammed into the center of a long row in the upper deck. Since we could barely see the puck, we watched most of the game on the Jumbotron.
A few days earlier, Bates and I had driven under a leaden sky through the gritty Ohio River Valley marked by crumbling mills and power plants to the bare-bones, nearly 50-year-old WesBanco Arena in Wheeling, West Virginia, to watch the Penguins’ lowliest minor league affiliate, the Wheeling Nailers, take on the Norfolk Admirals. Trips with Bates to Nailers games had been a regular feature of Pittsburgh winters ever since I spent a year researching my book on small-town baseball, documenting a season of the Batavia (New York) Muckdogs. In the bleachers of Dwyer Stadium, in a working-class town of about 15,000, I had become a convert to the pleasures of sports on a smaller scale.
Games in Batavia, like those in ballparks scattered across smaller cities throughout America, more closely resembled a community picnic than a big-budget spectacle. There, the lone security guard, Dave Fisher, an affable Gulf War veteran, greets the regulars by name as they arrive on pleasant summer nights, while the field inside is lovingly maintained by Larry Hale, a retired corrections officer from the infamous Attica Correctional Facility. Robbie Nichols, the team’s Canadian owner and former minor league hockey bruiser, could generally be found flipping burgers and running the register in the concession stand.
As one game melted into another over the course of summer, I discovered how the unassuming Batavia ballpark offered an affordable (season tickets were $99) oasis of happiness and fraternity amid the political discord enveloping American life. It was also charmingly quaint. Grandparents bundled up against the evening chill once the sun set over the left-field fence, enjoying easy conversation with their adult children and bleacher buddies, as young kids played catch near the bullpen.
There was a rhythm to those languid summer nights, almost providing a balm of sorts to the regulars whose lives outside the ballpark featured the same daily stresses we all face.
Wheeling offers a similar vibe. For around $25, my son and I can sit close enough for him to join in the teasing of players entering the penalty box. Like the bleachers in Batavia, the fans span generations, unlike the predominantly middle-aged demographic one finds at Penguins games. Kids can even enjoy a postgame skate on the rink where exhausted, but nonetheless smiling, players who might have made $750 that week will sign autographs before boarding buses for overnight rides to distant rinks.
At this level of sports, the relationship between players and fans (especially kids) is symbiotic. Most of the players will never set foot on an MLB field or NHL arena without buying a ticket, so they appreciate being treated like stars. Meanwhile, the kids are thrilled to get autographs from cool-looking athletes who are celebrities in their eyes. Bates even lit up when he got an autograph from Spike, a big, red dog mascot.
These farm leagues are now endangered, though, as improved collegiate sports provide fertile (and free) proving grounds for major league teams, and advanced analytics reduce (in the minds of some talent evaluators) the need for dozens of minor league teams scattered across the country. In baseball, big-market teams such as the Dodgers and Mets splurge on an arms race, signing a handful of players to contracts rapidly approaching a billion dollars. Meanwhile, in pursuit of “efficiency,” the new management class of Ivy-educated technocrats cut 40 of what had been 160 minor league affiliates (which each cost their major league parent teams around $600,000 a year). Working-class communities such as Pulaski, Virginia; Bluefield, West Virginia; and Billings, Montana — many of which had already been struggling economically — were stripped of yet another local treasure to save what some superstars earn in four or five games.
Sitting in the stands at Batavia or Wheeling, surrounded by smiling families, one struggles to reconcile the extravagant spending of major league sports with supposedly “necessary” cuts to the minor leagues.
The other day I discovered in Bates’s backpack an essay he had written for third grade describing a family trip to a ballgame in New York and how “it had been one of the best days of my life.” It wasn’t about Yankee Stadium or Citi Field, but rather Dwyer Stadium, where “it was so fun because I got all the players’ autographs … a day I’ll never forget.”
The post Small-town sports offer something the big leagues can’t appeared first on Washington Post.
