Ere long, thine every stream shall find a tongue
Land of the many waters!
—Charles Fenno Hoffman

There are no unsacred places
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places
—Wendell Berry

Locality gives art.
—Robert Frost

America, turn in and find yourself
—Paul Engle

“April hath come on,” as Nathaniel P. Willis began his best poem. ’Tis the month of violets and baseball, and so I must tell you about last summer’s Baseball Poetry Night, or what I like to call Shoving Culture Down Fans’ Throats Night, at Batavia’s venerable Dwyer Stadium. Team President Brian Paris, a veritable one-man Chautauqua of self-improvement, and I misconceived the idea; with the declamatory assistance of my daughter Gretel and Holland Land Office director Pat Weissend, Brian and I filled the between-innings air of the August 17 game between the Class A Batavia Muckdogs and the Auburn Doubledays with recitations of odes to the American Game by Charles Bukowski, Grantland Rice, the Beat poet Tom Clark, and other bards of the ball field. It went over as disastrously as you’d expect. My Batavia, God bless her, is poetical enough in my imagination, but as for poetry appreciation . . . well, let’s just say that when Brian asked the fans, “Do you want another poem or a song?” the shouts of “Song!” rivaled the New Testament crowd’s cry of “Free Barabbas!”

The Muckdogs lost the game, of course, but the muse couldn’t be blamed—not when your team average is a healthy man’s weight and you were recently victim of the first nine-inning perfect game in the New York Penn League since 1956.

The low minors are the heart and soul of professional baseball. Batavia is a charter member of the New York Penn League (nee PONY League), which was drawn up in 1939 over libations at Batavia’s long-ago-razed Hotel Richmond, named for the railroad baron and George McClellan-backing Democratic Party boss Dean Richmond, from whom the thieving Vanderbilts stole the New York Central.

No one has stolen our team yet, though as one of the smallest cities (population 16,000) in pro ball we are not unacquainted with the abyss. The ostensible function of a minor-league team is to develop players for the majors, but the real purpose of Dwyer Stadium is to provide a gathering place for friends and neighbors across the generations to enjoy fellowship, conversation, and baseball.