Safe at Home A Season in the Valley eBook Austin Gisriel Melissa Dodge
Download As PDF : Safe at Home A Season in the Valley eBook Austin Gisriel Melissa Dodge 
College baseball players hone their skills in summer leagues all across America. Often playing in small towns and living with host families, the players strive to develop their abilities to the point where they are signed to professional contracts. For the towns, the summer league team is often a major source of local pride and community involvement. Nowhere in America is this more true than in New Market, Virginia, where every game is “not just a game,” it’s an event. Safe at Home A Season in the Valley tells the story of the 2009 New Market Rebels and the townspeople who house them, feed them, and root for them; welcome them into their homes in June and send them back to their schools in August. In the process, both players and fans become part of something greater than themselves, even if it is just a baseball team in a little town in the Shenandoah Valley.
Safe at Home A Season in the Valley eBook Austin Gisriel Melissa Dodge
When I was young, my father would take me, my brother, and sometimes my sister to see the Harrisonburg Turks play at Harrisonburg High School's field. The Turks were part of the Valley League, and they played teams in Winchester, Front Royal, and Staunton, among others in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. In total, I think the league had eight teams. I can't say that I followed the Turks with great enthusiasm — I didn't know who any of the players were or where they came from — but it was something fun to do, like the time we won a turkey or the time the Turks couldn't get out of the early innings in a game against Winchester and my dad took us home early. Honestly, after we moved away, I didn't give the Turks much more thought. I assumed they must have been some sort of minor league team.Years later, I learned they weren't anything of the sort. The Valley League is a collegiate summer league, and its players are college students (unpaid, because of NCAA regulations) who are playing to refine skills, gain experience, and hopefully catch the attention of major league scouts. The Valley League, it turns out, is one of the premier collegiate summer leagues in the country, and the league bills itself as "The Gateway to the Majors." Now the league numbers twelve teams, from Charles Town, West Virginia in the north to Covington in the south and across the Blue Ridge to Charlottesville and Aldie in the east.
When I got home, I ran a few Google searches after dinner about the league, and I quickly came across a link on the New Market Rebels website for "Publications" which talked about a book, Safe at Home: A Season in the Valley, about the Rebels' 2009 season by Austin Gisriel. Despite some misgivings — an unknown author, a niche subject, and Smashwords aren't always a winning combination — the price, just $2.99, was unbeatable, so I decided to give Safe at Home a try. At worst, I would be out three dollars, and I would have to skip the office's vending machine for a week.
Gisriel, a writer from Maryland who discovered by chance the Rebels during a vacation several years earlier, was enchanted by the Platonic ideal of small town baseball — an old time field, a rustic setting, a passionate fanbase, and an emphasis on the game rather than the flashy videoboard and between-innings games — and decided to write a book about the Rebels and the New Market community. I shouldn't have been reticent about Safe at Home. It's an enjoyable and interesting book about small town America life (New Market's population is slightly under 2,000), its passion for baseball, a group of young men who have big dreams, and the community that supports and adopts them. It also helped to contextualize my memories of the Turks; in describing how the teams operate, Safe at Home answered some of my questions about the Valley League and its teams. Plus, the book mentions places that I dimly and distantly remember.
Teams operate as non-profits. Coaches are paid, the players are not. Much of the work behind-the-scenes, from maintaining the field and taking tickets to running the concession stand and the radio broadcast booth, is done by volunteers from the community who donate their time to give the players an environment where they can hone their playing skills. Others in the community open their homes to the players and host them for the two and a half months they're in the valley playing for the team. The players, no matter where they came from, are essentially adopted by the town as more than their hometown heroes. They become family; time and again, the townsfolk refer to the New Market Rebels players as "sons," and they genuinely mean it in an emotional way.
The first third of Safe at Home covers the business side of the New Market Rebels. Beginning with the departure of the players in August 2008, we see the team president and the board of trustees go through the process of hiring a manager for the 2009 season and secure sponsors in the midst of the 2008-9 economic downturn. We meet Mo Weber, a baseball lifer and the octogenarian hitting coach who, in spite of his age, is a lively character and for whom the game is a fountain of youth. We also get insight into how the league operates; time is spent on how the schedule is built as well as the negotiations for an exhibition game in the summer of 2009 against the all-stars of another summer league, the Cal Ripken Collegiate Baseball League in Maryland. Gisriel paints a portrait of the community and its long ties to baseball in these chapters, and we meet some of the fans who will open their homes to the Rebels in 2009.
The final two-thirds covers the 2009 season, from the players' arrival at the end of May through their departure in mid-August. The cast of characters expands greatly at this point, and we discover their stories. We follow them through the trials and tribulations of a 44-game schedule that seems to be beset by everything — fog, rain, hail, poison ivy, a river expedition gone horribly wrong — but plagues of locusts. Some players hope to impress the scouts. Some hope to be drafted. Others discover that their skills are suspect and need work or that their bodies aren't cut out for the daily grind of 44 games over six weeks. Some suffer major injuries. A few realize they've reached their ceiling in baseball and leave the team. We also see a manager, Lucas Jones, who, in his first managerial job, comes in with an attitude and maturity beyond his years and does an impressive job in handling the challenges of his players, the team, and the Valley League. Through it all, we see a group of young men, who were strangers when they started, learn how to come together and become a team.
Gisriel avoids the usual cliches of a scrappy, underdog team who finds a way to overcome the odds. This is a chronicle of a real team, not fiction, and the Rebels — like all but one team in every league every year — fall short of their goal of winning the championship. Yet, that doesn't make the journey any less worthwhile; a group of young men learned something about themselves in the pursuit of their dreams, and a farming town in the Shenandoah Valley found a new group of local heroes for the summer and let them into their hearts.
Safe at Home may not have been perfect, but it was good enough to win me over and recommend it. Gisriel paints a wonderful portrait of baseball in small town America and the communities that support it. If you've any interest in young baseball players and their quest to achieve their dreams, Safe at Home is a good story, one that's well told and worth your time.
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Safe at Home A Season in the Valley eBook Austin Gisriel Melissa Dodge Reviews
An excellent and engaging read. This book not only captures the grace of the game but also the family environment that is created around the home team. This book reads more like a novel and makes you feel like it is summer all over again when you read it. This book is not just for baseball lovers!
I was not familiar with the New Market Rebels prior to reading this book, but the author made me feel like I was right there the whole summer season! Very fun read & very well done. You can feel his love for baseball in every chapter!
Fast, engaging read. The author paints great word pictures and the pace of the book is good. It was over way too soon!
Safe at Home A Season in the Valley by Austin Gisriel is an engaging and comprehensive account of a season in the Valley Baseball League. As a fan and volunteer for the New Market Rebels I was delighted to read how aptly Gisriel captured and expressed the sights, sounds, and feelings of the 2009 season and the New Market Rebels community. Gisriel's unfettered access to the team brought to light new perspectives and dimensions that I was unaware of. Sure to delight baseball fans across the board,this is not just a baseball book, this is a story that reaffirms that the charm and goodness of small-town America still lives and thrives in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley.
My son played in the Valley League for a different team the year after the year recounted in this wonderful gem of a book, so I can speak about this book with some authority. Many of the same personalities were still around, and many of the kids in the League I knew from other ball teams and places. I can't say enough nice things about this book. The writing is poetic without being flowery, the players are brought to life and by the end of the book you know them very well, and all the ups and downs of a 44 game summer wood bat summer season are experienced. You may have seen the movie Summer Catch, which chronicles a guy in the Cape Cod League, and that is a fun movie, and captures some of what summer wood bat is like, but with a Hollywood twist to it. This is the real deal, told with love for the game and the players, the town of New Market Virginia, and the Shenandoah Valley. I bought two copies of this book over the summer of 2010, one for me, and one for my son to have in a few years. I plan to give him his copy when he turns about 30. By then, he will be nostalgic for his playing days, and this book will bring all those memories and joys flooding back to him. Did I mention that I love this book? Any baseball fan of any kind will also love it. And if you are a player or parent thinking about playing summer wood bat, this is absolutely a must read.
Fabulous! I loved it!
If you have ever attended a summer league baseball game anywhere you will appreciate this book. Does a great job of demonstrating how these leagues influence small towns and how communities rally among them. Only issue is Gisriel gets a bit annoying at times, inserts too much of his own feelings and emotions and I could not care less.
When I was young, my father would take me, my brother, and sometimes my sister to see the Harrisonburg Turks play at Harrisonburg High School's field. The Turks were part of the Valley League, and they played teams in Winchester, Front Royal, and Staunton, among others in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. In total, I think the league had eight teams. I can't say that I followed the Turks with great enthusiasm — I didn't know who any of the players were or where they came from — but it was something fun to do, like the time we won a turkey or the time the Turks couldn't get out of the early innings in a game against Winchester and my dad took us home early. Honestly, after we moved away, I didn't give the Turks much more thought. I assumed they must have been some sort of minor league team.
Years later, I learned they weren't anything of the sort. The Valley League is a collegiate summer league, and its players are college students (unpaid, because of NCAA regulations) who are playing to refine skills, gain experience, and hopefully catch the attention of major league scouts. The Valley League, it turns out, is one of the premier collegiate summer leagues in the country, and the league bills itself as "The Gateway to the Majors." Now the league numbers twelve teams, from Charles Town, West Virginia in the north to Covington in the south and across the Blue Ridge to Charlottesville and Aldie in the east.
When I got home, I ran a few Google searches after dinner about the league, and I quickly came across a link on the New Market Rebels website for "Publications" which talked about a book, Safe at Home A Season in the Valley, about the Rebels' 2009 season by Austin Gisriel. Despite some misgivings — an unknown author, a niche subject, and Smashwords aren't always a winning combination — the price, just $2.99, was unbeatable, so I decided to give Safe at Home a try. At worst, I would be out three dollars, and I would have to skip the office's vending machine for a week.
Gisriel, a writer from Maryland who discovered by chance the Rebels during a vacation several years earlier, was enchanted by the Platonic ideal of small town baseball — an old time field, a rustic setting, a passionate fanbase, and an emphasis on the game rather than the flashy videoboard and between-innings games — and decided to write a book about the Rebels and the New Market community. I shouldn't have been reticent about Safe at Home. It's an enjoyable and interesting book about small town America life (New Market's population is slightly under 2,000), its passion for baseball, a group of young men who have big dreams, and the community that supports and adopts them. It also helped to contextualize my memories of the Turks; in describing how the teams operate, Safe at Home answered some of my questions about the Valley League and its teams. Plus, the book mentions places that I dimly and distantly remember.
Teams operate as non-profits. Coaches are paid, the players are not. Much of the work behind-the-scenes, from maintaining the field and taking tickets to running the concession stand and the radio broadcast booth, is done by volunteers from the community who donate their time to give the players an environment where they can hone their playing skills. Others in the community open their homes to the players and host them for the two and a half months they're in the valley playing for the team. The players, no matter where they came from, are essentially adopted by the town as more than their hometown heroes. They become family; time and again, the townsfolk refer to the New Market Rebels players as "sons," and they genuinely mean it in an emotional way.
The first third of Safe at Home covers the business side of the New Market Rebels. Beginning with the departure of the players in August 2008, we see the team president and the board of trustees go through the process of hiring a manager for the 2009 season and secure sponsors in the midst of the 2008-9 economic downturn. We meet Mo Weber, a baseball lifer and the octogenarian hitting coach who, in spite of his age, is a lively character and for whom the game is a fountain of youth. We also get insight into how the league operates; time is spent on how the schedule is built as well as the negotiations for an exhibition game in the summer of 2009 against the all-stars of another summer league, the Cal Ripken Collegiate Baseball League in Maryland. Gisriel paints a portrait of the community and its long ties to baseball in these chapters, and we meet some of the fans who will open their homes to the Rebels in 2009.
The final two-thirds covers the 2009 season, from the players' arrival at the end of May through their departure in mid-August. The cast of characters expands greatly at this point, and we discover their stories. We follow them through the trials and tribulations of a 44-game schedule that seems to be beset by everything — fog, rain, hail, poison ivy, a river expedition gone horribly wrong — but plagues of locusts. Some players hope to impress the scouts. Some hope to be drafted. Others discover that their skills are suspect and need work or that their bodies aren't cut out for the daily grind of 44 games over six weeks. Some suffer major injuries. A few realize they've reached their ceiling in baseball and leave the team. We also see a manager, Lucas Jones, who, in his first managerial job, comes in with an attitude and maturity beyond his years and does an impressive job in handling the challenges of his players, the team, and the Valley League. Through it all, we see a group of young men, who were strangers when they started, learn how to come together and become a team.
Gisriel avoids the usual cliches of a scrappy, underdog team who finds a way to overcome the odds. This is a chronicle of a real team, not fiction, and the Rebels — like all but one team in every league every year — fall short of their goal of winning the championship. Yet, that doesn't make the journey any less worthwhile; a group of young men learned something about themselves in the pursuit of their dreams, and a farming town in the Shenandoah Valley found a new group of local heroes for the summer and let them into their hearts.
Safe at Home may not have been perfect, but it was good enough to win me over and recommend it. Gisriel paints a wonderful portrait of baseball in small town America and the communities that support it. If you've any interest in young baseball players and their quest to achieve their dreams, Safe at Home is a good story, one that's well told and worth your time.
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