The Alaska Baseball League in a Nutshell
If you’re a collegiate baseball player, there are basically three places where you want to go in the summer: Cape Cod, with Team USA, or to Alaska. Since I know enough about Cape Cod, I decided to dig up some dirt on Alaska.
As far as I can tell, the league can be traced back to 1923, when William Mulcahy established the Anchorage Baseball League [Wikipedia]. The Alaska Baseball League was officially founded in in 1969, and was the premier amateur summer baseball league until the Cape took that title over in the 90s [SLAM! Sports]. The list of major leaguers is impressive and includes Barry Bonds, Tom Seaver, Dave Winfield, Jered Weaver, Mark McGwire, Randy Johnson, Jason Giambi, and Michael Young.
The league has six teams: the Anchorage Glacier Pilots, the Anchorage Bucs, the Alaska Goldpanners of Fairbanks, the Mat-Su Miners, the Peninsula Oilers, and Athletes in Action (Fairbanks) [Wikipedia]. There are four different fields used in the league, spanning 512 miles. Want the exact locations? I made a Google Earth file that you can download: alaska_baseball_league.kmz. Google Earth is a free satellite/mapping program and can be downloaded at http://earth.google.com/.
There are quite a few differences from the Cape League. For instance, the teams in the Alaska League have to fly between the fields because they are so far apart. Also, the Alaska League is a member of the National Baseball Congress, which is an organization of amateur and semi-pro baseball leagues. Every year, the Alaska League sends over their regular season champion to compete in the NBC World Series, held in Wichita, KS in August. Beginning next year, the league will send over any team that wants to compete [adn.com].
Here’s a video about the league by FOX Sports Northwest:
On July 31, 2003, a plane crashed during a game between the Alaska Goldpanners of Fairbanks and the Anchorage Bucs. No one was seriously injured as a result of the crash, but the video made it to national news via ESPN and Fox Sports.
Here is an amazing video of the plane crash:
Every year on the longest day of the year (June 21st, the Summer Solstice), the Alaska Goldpanners of Fairbanks host the “Midnight Sun Game.” The game begins at 10:30pm and it never gets dark since the sun never sets (though I did some research and found out that the sun should set around 11:39pm). The 100th Midnight Sun Game was played this year:
The makers of the Cape Cod Baseball League documentary Touching the Game (directed by Jim Carroll) are currently hard at work making Touching the Game: Midnight Sun, which will be a documentary about the Alaska League released in 2007 [Goldpanners.com]. Jim created the video above about the 100th Midnight Sun Game.
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