• “I get a recipe every year,” Tracie Carlos said.

Tracie Carlos measures her summers in meals.

An old family jumbalaya recipe, a surprise Hawaiian dinner, many late nights spent grilling. All these meals have led up to 17 years of memories for Carlos and her husband, Vince, as a host family for the Vermont Lake Monsters.

“I get a recipe every year,” she said.

The Carloses are one of 17 local families who serve as hosts for Burlington’s single-season Single A minor-league baseball team, a home away from home during the summer months.

“The biggest thing we want is for these guys, while they are here, to have a good experience,” said Kate Echo, Lake Monsters merchandising and account manager. “They are here on the field, but we want them to be able to go home and be comfortable and get a good night’s sleep.”

Local families provide a bed, a place to rest after long days on the road and a sympathetic ear after a tough night at the ballpark. But, maybe most important of all, they provide food, lots and lots of food.

“Part of being a professional athlete is dieting and so I am trying to eat as many calories as I can,” said Lake Monsters outfielder Eli White, who lives with the Carlos family. “It all goes back to food, honestly.”

Cooking is caring

For Tracie Carlos, providing food is easy. A volunteer for COTS, who also cooks for a monthly meal for the homeless and caters on the side, likes to be in the kitchen.

“For me, this is how I am wired, I communicate how I care and that’s through cooking,” she said. “It’s comforting.”

Whether it’s providing a home-cooked meal when the players are feeling homesick or just offering healthy meals to balance out fast-food, the Carloses are always ready with a something warm for the players to eat at their Essex home.

“It’s back to that family atmosphere,” Vince Carlos said. “We sit there and we have dinner with them, at 11:30 at night we’re barbequeing outside, which is crazy. It just gives them a time to breakdown after the game.”

That attitude is exactly what Echo, who has run the host family program for the Lake Monsters for seven years, wants out of the people with whom she pairs the players.

While a family dinner is not required or even expected, it is all about providing a comfortable place to escape after long days at the ballpark.

“We are at the field 24/7 so you go there and all you pretty much do is sleep and eat,’ said Derek Beasley, a pitcher for the Lake Monsters. “You come home and you’ve got someone there for you, you are not alone, you don’t have to sit in sorrow by yourself. If you have a bad day, you have someone to talk to.”

The Lake Monsters request that a family provide a bed, preferably one that provides the player with their own space, and food. While some families, like the Carloses, provide meals, the organization just requests that the family keeps the fridge stocked.

“They do have to provide food in the house for them to eat,” Echo said. “Not so much a formal meal setting, but if they want to make some scramble eggs or something, there are those options.”

Providing food for their players turns into nightly meals for the players that live with the Carloses, this year White and pitcher Brandon Bailey.

Tracie Carlos, who says that her family has hosted between 45 and 60 players in the years that they have acted as a host family, usually listens to the game on the radio and when it ends, starts cooking. By the time the players have wrapped up their post-game routines, a meal is at home, ready for them.

“She’s a great cook, I haven’t eaten anything there that I haven’t liked,” White said. “I am loving the food she has been cooking.”

Music to Tracie Carlos’ ears.

“Eli (White) says that he usually loses a lot of weight and he has not lost any,” Tracie Carlos said. “That’s my goal, I’m feeding you until you’re plump.”

Carpool to the park

Next to food, transportation is the deciding factor on where players will live for the summer. Any player who can get a car is paired with or placed near a player who does not. Anything that makes it easier for the Lake Monster players to get to the park.

“If I know a family can provide a car, I probably put a guy from California there who is not going to be able to get a car,” Echo said. “Certainly personalities come into play ... but a lot of it is transportation and how we can maximize the amount of car pooling.”

Transportation could soon cause tension for Nikki Stevens and her family.

“This year, my son got his license and he has a car, but he is away for the summer,” Stevens said. “We are going to have some problems when he gets back, I am sure.”

The car fight will just be an extension, Stevens said, of how much Beasley has become a part of the family.

“My husband and I always say, ‘he’s the nicest kid I have,’” Stevens said.

The Stevens family made the decision to welcome a player into their home last summer and had no idea what to expect, but wanted someone her baseball-loving younger son could look up to.

At the end of the first summer, Beasley was a member of the Stevens clan.

“As far as we are concerned, he is part of our family,” Stevens said. “That is how I treat him.”

After spending last year with the Stevens’, Beasley came back for a second round this season when he returned to the franchise.

“I came to a great host family, really nice and supportive,” the left-handed pitcher said. “They come to all my games, I couldn’t ask for any better. It’s not really different from home because it has a home feel.”

The home feel extends to the time that Beasley is not in Vermont, with Stevens sending along care packages and sending along text messages and social media messages.

“In the winter, I would take pictures of our house, with four feet of snow, and send that to Derek,” Stevens said. “That’s how we communicated back and forth, our different lives.”

Friends and family

That kind of interaction, a relationship built outside the ballpark, is something that keeps the Carloses coming back for more.

“You connect with some (of the players) on a different level,” Vince Carlos said. “You can continue that friendship for life.”

Originally joining the host family ranks because of two young boys who played baseball, the couple continues to open up their home, despite the fact that both sons are grown and out of the house.

“We want to offer a safe home and good meal,” Tracie Carlos said. “We always thought that, if our child ever needed it, we wanted them to have a good home to go to. So, that’s what we did.

“We have a large home, we want to share it.”

One of the few times that the Carloses almost gave it up, it was those relationships that drew them back in.

“One year, we were going to quit and within the hour, I get a picture of Craig Stammen, who was a pitcher for the Nationals, with John Lannan, a starting pitcher for the Nationals, and Andy Lane, who was a coach with the Cubs,” Tracie Carlos said. “They were in this picture, with the Cubs scoreboard behind them, and said ‘we just got to talking about you and missed you and wanted to thank you for all you did.’

“So, we continued.”

The connections made keep the Carloses coming back and have drawn the Stevens’ in and that is what Echo hopes for every off season, when she puts out the call for host families.

“We have families that have gone to weddings and have seen the birth of children for these guys and gone to see them at the major league level,” Echo said. “It’s a really experience for them.”

Contact Lauren Read at 660-1855 or lread1@freepresmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/laurenreadvt