Dwyer Stadium

Dwyer Stadium in Batavia, NY, was the home of Batavia affiliated baseball from 1996 through 2019. After that and the Coronavirus pandemic-canceled 2020 season, MLB's 2021 Minor League Reorganization eliminated the Batavia Muckdogs and most other New York-Pennsylvania League teams.

The Muckdogs then joined the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League.

A Class A-Short Season team in a saturated region - three Triple-A, one Double-A, and three Short-A teams lay within 50 miles of a line between Erie, PA, and Syracuse, NY - the franchise was already so troubled that the Rochester Red Wings operated it from 2008 through 2017, with the NYPL taking over in 2018. The first year under the league saw attendance rise a bit, and in the second it jumped - by half, and out of the NYPL basement.

That led to a lease renewal through April 1, 2022 - impacted, of course, by both the Coronavirus pandemic and the 2021 contraction. Different ownership then landed a Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League franchise, taking over the brand, and the new Muckdogs won the Genesee County Chamber of Commerce Entrepreneurial Business of the Year award by reviving baseball at Dwyer. In opening their 2023 season, the Muckdogs drew 3,711 - roughly 400 more than the largest crowd of Dwyer's affiliated era.

State Street Stadium opened on this piece of ground in 1939 - the same historic year the Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York League was founded, on January 9th, by 75 baseball enthusiasts at the Hotel Richmond in Batavia.[1] Both names would change: Around the end of World War II, the ballpark became MacArthur Stadium in honor of General Douglas MacArthur; in 1957, after the PONY League's last Canadian team folded, the circuit began playing as the NYPL. In 1973, the wooden ballpark changed names again - to Dwyer Stadium, for longtime club president Edward Dwyer. That name carried over when, amid a wave of new ballparks around the country, a completely rebuilt playpen opened on the same site in 1996.

The general's name may be gone from the ballpark, but even today the first street north of it is MacArthur Drive and two streets to the south is Douglas Street.