You can’t hold onto anything in this world. That doesn’t mean you can’t squeeze it all so tightly to your heart that it hurts.

I recently put Will Bardenwerper’s book Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America on my reading list. After reading Timothy Carney’s review of the book at the Washington Free Beacon I moved it to the top of that list.

Here is a taste of Carnery’s review:

Homestand is a book about baseball, and the author is a Mets fan. Thus, Homestand is a book about loss.

It’s not only about loss, of course, and the Mets are only in the background. The 2022 Batavia Muckdogs, the centerpiece of Homestand, win most of their games, including an exciting playoff run.

Homestand isn’t only about baseball, either. It’s also about capitalism and community—and about the complicated relationship between the two.

Batavia is a Rust Belt town in Upstate New York, and so you can probably guess some of the book’s themes. The railroads aren’t the business they once were. The Interstate bypassed the downtown. Industry fled. The local grocery store, the Dipson Theater, and the Dagwood Restaurant all fell to a “ghastly mall” as local writer Bill Kauffman puts it. Homestand has its older, suffering working-class white heroes with a fondness for Donald Trump that the author finds regrettable.

There are big corporate bad guys in this book, such as the Big Box chain stores and Ogden Media, which the author describes as “profiting from the gutting of local newspapers.” But the biggest and baddest of the bad guys is Major League Baseball, which announced in 2020 that it would terminate 40 of its 160 minor-league affiliates.

For Batavia that meant that their beloved Muckdogs (in the farm system of the Miami Marlins) would be killed. Homestand begins on a dark and cold December day with two diehard fans, Betsey and Ginny, sitting in the empty grandstands, lamenting the unbearable loss of the Muckdogs. Neither woman was much of a sports fan, but both had made the bleachers at Batavia’s Dwyer Stadium the center of their summer.

And this:

One backdrop of this book is the Mets’ 2022 season, because many Batavians are, like Bardenwerper, Mets fans. The most prickly, unlikable character in the book wears his Mets cap at all times.

Bardenwerper doesn’t provide the details of the Mets’ run that summer, but it’s a fitting backdrop. The Mets would win 101 games that season, yet didn’t win the division—and they got eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. The 2022 Mets saw a never-before-and-never-again season of near perfection by their closer Edwin Diaz. It saw the sunset of the Mets’ career of Jacob DeGrom, a Hall-of-Fame-level hurler whose brief bloom was spectacular.

These performances and runs were so beautiful, so exciting, so perfect that every fan wanted to hold onto them. But you can’t hold onto a sunset. You can’t hold onto a season. Summer always slips away.

You also can’t hold onto Main Street, onto the Dagwood Restaurant, onto the factory job your father had. You can’t hold onto anything in this world. That doesn’t mean you can’t squeeze it all so tightly to your heart that it hurts. Homestead is a beautiful work of melancholy, because it’s a heartfelt effort to hold onto beauty in a world of loss.

Read the entire review here.