Midnight Sun Game a Natural
January 1, 2000, Daily News-Miner

By RICHARD LARSON

There are many events that capture a part of Fairbanks, from its bitter winters and strong sled dog tradition, to its ethnic history and surrounding geography.

The Midnight Sun Game is unique in Fairbanks' sporting history, however, promoting two things that aren't often associated with Interior Alaska: baseball and long, long summer days. Days in which the sun does set, but night never actually comes.

In fact it stays bright enough that a baseball game can be played overnight without the aid of artificial light, starting at 10:15 p.m. and sometimes not finishing until after 2 a.m.

Midnight sun baseball has been played in some form since 1906, and for the past 40 years the game has been played by the Alaska Goldpanners, a summer amateur baseball team that has had more than 160 players eventually compete in Major League Baseball.

"The story goes that it was two teams sponsored by local bars and it was the result of a bet about whether they really could play a game overnight," said Goldpanners general manager Don Dennis of the 1906 contest. "One of the teams involved was sponsored by the California Bar and (current Goldpanners president) Bill Stroecker's father was on that team."

The oldest newspaper clipping on file regarding the annual contest comes from the Fairbanks Daily Times in 1912 when the Van Dycks beat the Eagles 20-5 at Exposition Park in a matchup already referred to as the "annual Midnight Sun Game."

A total of 667 fans paid to see that game and, "considerable interest was manifested by the spectators at times in the game, although near the end, the grandstand was practically empty," read the Daily Times story.

Ed Stroecker was the winning pitcher, giving up seven hits in a complete game.

Since the Panners took over the game, as many as 5,200 fans have crammed into Growden Memorial Park to watch the Midnight Sun Game, the majority coming from Outside. The national media regularly shows up to cover the unique event.

"Just about everybody has been here over the years," Dennis said. "In the late 1970s Sports Illustrated did like a 14-page spread. That year it was really dark and the story started out, 'If you are a person that's afraid of things that go bump in the night ... ' "

The Midnight Sun Game has come close to being canceled, and in fact it was postponed twice, but it has been played every year since 1906. In 1968 and 1994 the game was played a day later than originally scheduled because of rain.

In 1980 the Panners held an 8-0 lead over Moraga, Calif., and the visiting Marauders had just batted in the top of the fifth inning to make it an official contest before the skies opened up and it poured down rain.

"It was the heaviest rainfall I've ever seen. The game was rained out in 30 seconds," Dennis said. "You could see the clouds building up and we were just praying it would get to midnight before it rained. It was 12:45 a.m. when the game was called. WTBS out of Atlanta was here for that game."

The Panners are 31-9 in Midnight Sun Games, having won 12 straight and 20 of the past 21 games.

"That's kind of strange," Dennis said of the recent win streak, "because for a while there it was a big story that we didn't do very well in the Midnight Sun Game. We had Kumagai-Gumi (of Japan) up for an eight-game series in 1967 and the only game of the series we lost was the Midnight Sun Game."

The game is stopped after the half-inning nearest midnight for the singing of the Alaska Flag Song. The sun is just setting in the north as the game gets underway and is usually just rising, again in the north, at the game's conclusion.

January 1, 2000, Daily News-Miner