Safe at Every Base but Home

On a baseball field, Comiskey Mercer always knows where he stands. At home, the rules change every time his alcoholic father opens another bottle.

Raised amid violence and instability, Comiskey learns early to protect his mother, shield his younger brother, and listen for danger at the front door. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, foster homes separate him from the family he is desperate to save. Through it all, baseball remains the one place with dependable lines, honest counts, and rules that stay the same.

From his first game at five to three city championships, Comiskey builds his identity around the sport. At sixteen, after nearly abandoning baseball, he joins a bitter rival and helps carry them through an undefeated run to the championship. At eighteen, he travels to Ottawa for a chance at minor-league baseball-only to discover that determination cannot guarantee the future he imagined.

As playing gives way to coaching, fatherhood, fractured relationships, addiction, and mental-health crises, Comiskey must confront the painful inheritance left by his father. Survival, he discovers, is not the same as healing-and breaking a family cycle requires more than simply refusing to repeat its worst acts.

Inspired by lived experience, Safe at Every Base but Home is an intimate novel about childhood trauma, foster care, baseball, fatherhood, forgiveness, and the difficult work of building a home where no one has to be afraid.