The Valley Baseball League is an NCAA-sanctioned collegiate summer baseball league in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia. Each Valley Baseball League season consists of 44 games played during summer. Many Valley Baseball League players have continued on to play in Major League Baseball.
The league was started in 1923 and sanctioned by the NCAA in 1961. It has been a wooden bat league since 1993. It is one of eight leagues in the National Alliance of Collegiate Summer Baseball. The league is also sanctioned by Major League Baseball and receives a small grant for operating expenses.
In 2007, The Valley Baseball League expanded to include one new team with the addition of the Fauquier Gators. Another team was supposed to be added in Lexington, Virginia but there were difficulties with the lighting system that delayed their addition to the league. The VBL announced, officially, in July 2008 that the Rapids (playing in Lexington, on Washington and Lee's field) they began playing in the 2009 season.
Read more about Valley Baseball League: Champions, Notable Players
Famous quotes containing the words valley, baseball and/or league:
“There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet
As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet;”
—Thomas Moore (1779–1852)
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)
“Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward the Light Brigade!”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)