Preview of Farm Team Summary:

Farm life is a fact of life for Billy Baggs, a talented baseball player whose high school baseball career is cut short by his father's run-in with the law that lands him in jail.

While Abner Baggs peters out his summer days in the jail cell, fourteen-year-old Billy is left to tend to the chores on the family's Minnesota farm, his mother having to work in town and his brother having died a few years earlier in a tragic farming accident.

Bad news seems to face Billy on all fronts, but he keeps his sorrows to himself, pining after the baseball field until his mother gets the idea to build a field on the Baggs farm and invite all the neighbors to join the "farm team."

Throughout the course of the novel, Billy diligently works for his family, examines his changing relationship to girls, fends for himself against...