Off the Beaten Basepaths #4: Rebel Park in New Market, VA
July 8, 2012 by Austin Gisriel · Leave a Comment
Few ballparks in America offer an old-fashioned ambiance as does Rebel Park in New Market, Virginia. Coupled with its spectacular view of Massanutten Mountain, Rebel Park might be the most scenic baseball site in the Eastern United States. It is home to the New Market Rebels of the Valley Baseball League, a wooden bat, summer, […]
Remembering Nick Adenhart
April 9, 2012 by Austin Gisriel · Leave a Comment
The following is an excerpt from Safe at Home: A Season in the Valley, which I wrote in 2009 about a college summer league team, the New Market Rebels. Preparations were well under way for the Rebel season when Nick Adenhart, who happened to be from my home of Williamsport, MD was killed three years […]
When John Kruk Was Quiet, Slender, and Attacked by a Grandma
July 21, 2011 by Austin Gisriel · Leave a Comment
John Kruk was a skinny kid out of Keyser, West Virginia in the summer of 1981, but he had already attracted the attention of several scouts. “A great guy . . . a natural athlete,” remembers Preston Douglas, the head coach that season of the New Market Rebels, the collegiate summer team with whom Kruk […]
Baseball Passion in Small Town America
May 19, 2011 by Austin Gisriel · Leave a Comment
We sometimes forget in this ESPN Age the great passion that baseball once inspired on the most local of levels. Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley has had a long love for baseball and there are two towns, some 20 miles or so apart that are perfect examples. New Market, which saw the last Confederate victory in the […]
