ACROSS THE COUNTRY
Baseball in the Everlasting Light of Fairbanks, Alaska
For more than a century, baseball teams in Fairbanks have played at midnight on the summer solstice, illuminated only by the sun.
WHY WE’RE HERE
We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time. In Fairbanks, Alaska, they play baseball at midnight, because they can.
By Tim Arango
Visuals by Emily Maye
Reporting from Fairbanks, Alaska
In the never-ending lightness of the Alaskan summer, baseball at midnight needs no artificial illumination. That’s good, because the lights towering over Growden Memorial Ballpark in Fairbanks don’t work anyway. They haven’t in more than 20 years — maybe because of a lightning strike, but no one can say for sure.
For more than a century, baseball teams in Fairbanks have played a game on the summer solstice, starting around 10 p.m. and playing through midnight.
Fans hoping to buy tickets for the Midnight Sun game lined up long before first pitch last Friday. As they waited, the E.T. Barnette String Band played nearby. Adorning a wall of the ballpark’s entryway were photographs of Barry Bonds, Dave Winfield and Jason Giambi, major league stars who once wore the red and gold of the Alaska Goldpanners.
First in line was Loretta Fogg, a bush pilot who takes tourists into the wilderness. She arrived a little after 4 p.m., pulled up a camping chair and cracked open a novel about witchcraft.
Usually, Ms. Fogg said, the baseball is crisp in the early innings, when the light is good. But later play can get sloppy. “The sun starts to go and the errors start,” she said.
As fans entered the ballpark, a jazz orchestra played baseball tunes above the home team’s dugout. A smoky haze from wildfires burning to the west far beyond center field obscured an apricot sun. On the field, pregame preparation was underway, hitters getting their swings, fielders taking fungoes.
Conner Wolf, the starting pitcher for the Goldpanners, said his parents back home in Tipton, Mo., had set an alarm to watch the game online. Mr. Wolf, a right-hander from Central Missouri State University, chose Alaska for his last season of summer ball partly for the chance to play on the solstice.
Behind home plate, Molly Sipe, who has attended more Midnight Sun games than she can count after living for “49 years in the 49th state,” said the game is an affirmation that the community has “earned” its baseball season.
“It’s a celebration of what we’ve been through,” she said. “It is really coming out of the darkness of the winter and celebrating.”
Finally, high in the ballpark’s rickety, wooden press box, Gero von Dehn, the play-by-play man for the team’s YouTube channel, barked: “Let’s play baseball, everyone. It’s time for the 120th Midnight Sun game, live from Fairbanks, Alaska, 153 miles from the Arctic Circle, on the longest day of the year.”
The Social Order of Fairbanks
Soapy Smith’s in downtown Fairbanks is as much a museum as a restaurant, stuffed with Alaskan memorabilia, from an old dogsled to booties made of sealskin to old photographs of bush pilots and gold miners.
They are all family keepsakes of Nick Stepovich, whose father, Mike, was the last territorial governor of Alaska. Appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1957, Mike Stepovich ushered Alaska into statehood, touring the country lobbying on behalf of his region.
He was also a coach for the Goldpanners.
“I call this the Goldpanners’ corner,” Nick said, pointing to framed newspaper articles, a photograph of his father with Satchel Paige, and old baseball cards.
“Baseball was part of the civic order, the social order,” he said. Nick, 67, worked at Growden as a kid, first selling popcorn and peanuts and soda and later as a groundskeeper. The ballpark, he said, “was a place where you grew through your adolescence. Maybe where for the first time you held hands with a girl.”
The history of baseball in Alaska is inseparable from the summer light. With more than 20 hours of official daylight in summer — and even when the sun dips briefly, it never gets completely dark — gold miners could put in long days and still find time for baseball. The first solstice game was played in 1906, as a bet between two bars. In the decades before the founding of the Goldpanners in 1960, which brought the future Hall of Famers like Tom Seaver and Mr. Winfield to Fairbanks, the games featured teams of miners, military men and local college players.
“With the light, people still had time to have leisure and enjoyment,” said Katherine J. Ringsmuth, Alaska’s state historian, who presented a display about the history of Alaska baseball at the Midnight Sun game. “I really see baseball as an important vehicle for turning mining camps into real communities.”
For the ballplayers who spend their summers in Fairbanks, postgame activities can stretch deep into the morning. “More than half the team was out fishing until 3 a.m. a couple nights ago,” said John Lohrke, the Goldpanners’ general manager. “I mean, the sun’s up.”
Ms. Ringsmuth is leading a state project to celebrate baseball in Alaska as part of America’s 250th birthday next year. Baseball, she said, was one thing that unites a big state with a small but diverse population.
Native Alaskans embraced baseball and made it their own, devising their own rules and styles of play, she said. They played on ice, and with sealskin baseballs.
The same presidential order in 1942 that forced Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II was also used to evacuate Indigenous peoples from the Aleutian Islands, part of the Alaskan territory. And when Navy ships arrived on Saint Paul Island to carry out the order, they interrupted a game of baseball, Ms. Ringsmuth said.
‘A Jewel of a Baseball Field’
When Mr. Lohrke took over the summer league team made up of college players in 2016, the ballpark was in decay, revenue was down and the shine of the franchise’s storied history as an incubator of major league talent had long worn off.
The composer John Luther Adams, who lived in Alaska for decades and was a Goldpanners board member, described Growden’s infield before Mr. Lohrke took over as “a worn-out turf carpet that looks like a bad toupee from the 1970s.” The seats on the third-base side, he wrote, were “so rotten that it’s dangerous to sit in them.” Despite this, or maybe because of it, Mr. Adams regarded it as “a jewel of a baseball field.”
“I’m fortunate in a way to have taken over something that was so down,” said Mr. Lohrke, whose father, Jack, played the infield for the New York Giants and Philadelphia Phillies in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The team, a nonprofit, raised enough money to install a new turf infield, a new scoreboard and an outfield fence painted as the Alaska state flag — seven stars depicting the Big Dipper and the North Star on a field of dark blue — serving as a batter’s eye. The recent addition of Growden to the National Register of Historic Places could help attract grants to restore and preserve the place, he said.
With the ballpark refreshed, Mr. Lohrke was able to raise ticket prices.
“It’s just so unique,” he said. “It’s small town, and it’s baseball and it’s a bucket list thing.”
‘It’s Just Part of Me’
As Mr. Wolf took the mound in the top of the first inning, Gloria Corey, who began attending Midnight Sun games in 1964 with her late husband, an engineer for the Alaska railroad, settled in her seat along the third-base line.
Last year, at age 90, she threw out the first pitch.
“Oh, it means an awful lot,” she said of the game and the ballpark. “It’s just part of me.”
At midnight, just after the seventh-inning stretch, the game paused, as part of tradition, and the Fairbanks Sweet Adelines sang the Alaska Flag song.
“It’s hard to put it into words what it’s like,” said Alex Garcia, a utility infielder from nearby North Pole, Alaska, who has been with the Goldpanners for four summers. “But when you do watch it or you do play in it, it’s a whole different world.”
Children played catch behind the bleachers while teenagers flirted near the concession stand and young adults filled the beer garden. Ms. Corey watched every pitch, and Nick Stepovich munched on popcorn from his seat behind home plate, as the game stretched on with little drama. The Anchorage Glacier Pilots, the Goldpanners’ historic rival, took the lead in the first inning with a three-run home run and never gave it up.
In the bottom of the ninth with two outs, Evan Rolbiecki, the Goldpanners’ left fielder, hit an easy ground ball to the second baseman, who tossed it to first to end the game and secure the win for the Glacier Pilots.
It was 20 minutes before 1 a.m., and the only light was a fading sun.
Cinematography by Angus Morton.
Tim Arango is a correspondent covering national news. He is based in Los Angeles.
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