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2015: A Peek at Baseball in Alaska 4 Playing at the top of the World By Tom Hardesty FAIRBANKS, Alaska — Brian Lees is standing near the home dugout at Growden Memorial Park, amused as he watches some of his Alaska Goldpanner teammates employ a bucket to try and catch a field mouse that has just darted underneath a fence and into the stadium. The mouse’s elusiveness brings a smile to Lees’ face, and the Goldpanner catcher, who has just completed his sophomore year at the University of Akron, is about to take the bucket and do it himself when his teammates finally nab the rodent and remove it from harm’s way. The mouse has provided a brief diversion from pregame preparations for that night’s Alaska Baseball League game against the Peninsula Oilers, which is still several hours from first pitch. But in a strange way, the mouse has done its small part in helping the Goldpanners come just a little closer together as a team — some of the players having just arrived at the stadium for the first time in their lives earlier in the day. It’s late June, and Lees has already been in Alaska for a couple weeks. But he still barely knows many of the players he will be spending nearly every day with for the rest of the summer. “It’s very different,” said Lees, the Great Mouse Caper having reached a favorable conclusion, “but this is a great opportunity. I couldn’t pass it up.” Lees, like every other Goldpanner, has journeyed to Alaska in hopes of catching the eye of a Major League Baseball scout. The six teams in the Alaska Baseball League are comprised primarily of collegiate players seeking an opportunity to showcase their abilities against some of the best amateur talent the United States has to offer. They have from June to August to get a foot in the MLB door, roughly 50 games to hone their skills and polish their craft enough to either be drafted (if they aren’t already), sign a free-agent contract or be invited back to the Goldpanners for another go-round the next summer. LIFE IN FAIRBANKS In winter, the temperature in Fairbanks generally hovers around 15 to 25 below, but the thermometer can dip to 60, sometimes even 75 degrees, below zero. The snowpack in and around the central Alaska city of 32,000 hardy souls usually blankets the ground from October to May, forcing residents to contend with deep snow and biting cold the majority of the year. “Some areas could have five or six feet of snow, easy,” said Rodney Evans, a member of the Goldpanners’ Board of Directors and a lifelong Fairbanks resident. “Highways will be closed down because the winds cause drifting. You’ve just got to be prepared for the cold.” Evans is sitting in the first row of seats behind home plate at Growden Memorial Park, which happens to be the northern-most baseball stadium on Earth. It’s nearly nine o’clock at night, but the sun is still high in the sky at this latitude as the Goldpanners do battle with the Oilers, their ABL rivals from the southern part of the state. It’s a balmy summer evening in Fairbanks, with fans in attendance sporting sunglasses, T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops. With the heat and mosquitoes, you would think you were in the southeastern United States rather than near the top of the world. “You learn to adjust during winter,” said Evans. “You always cover your face and don’t leave any skin exposed or you’ll get frostbite. You dress in layers.” There’s something else residents must battle in winter — something, in many ways, more difficult to handle than the blowing snow and numbing cold. “Darkness,” said Evans. “In the winter time it never really gets completely light out. When the sun comes up in the morning, all you see is a little sliver of light. And then it’s down again. “Some people have trouble adjusting to it.” Still, a large number of native Fairbanksians wouldn’t — maybe couldn’t — live anywhere else. “It’s my home,” said Evans. It’s against this wintry backdrop of a city gripped much of the year by snow, ice and frigid temperatures that some of baseball’s greatest players have gotten their jumpstart to the professional ranks. And far beyond. BASEBALL AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD Growden Memorial Park has a charm all its own. Rolling, forested foothills serve as a dramatic backdrop in the distance beyond the outfield fence, providing a sweeping panorama of the remote central Alaskan landscape. Growden also features towering light standards, but lights are rarely necessary for Goldpanner games because, well, it really doesn’t get dark in Alaska during the summer. The sun simply circles the top of the planet, setting just long enough on the western horizon to leave behind the orange glow of dusk while daybreak simultaneously lights up the sky in the east. The net result is never-ending daylight in the summer months. In fact, the Goldpanners are famous for their “Midnight Sun Game,” played in Fairbanks on the summer solstice every year since 1960. The game starts at 10:30 p.m. and ends around 1:30 a.m. — no lights necessary — and receives national press coverage. “The biggest thing I had to get used to was the daylight,” said Lees. “The sun gives you so much energy. Since it’s always light out, you don’t realize how late it’s getting sometimes. You’re just up doing things and you don’t realize how late it’s getting. It took me about a week to get used to it.” Growden Memorial Park, though, is much more than a quaint baseball stadium located a mere 120 miles south of the Arctic Circle. It’s a real-life field of dreams for college players looking to impress the Major League scouts that are often in attendance at ABL games. In fact, on this night a scout from the Los Angeles Angels is sitting in the stands directly behind the plate, armed with a notebook and radar gun. “They’ve had a lot of players from this team make it to the Major Leagues over the years,” said Lees. “Guys can really further their careers by playing here.” They certainly can. The impressive list of players who have worn the Goldpanner uniform reads like a Major League All-Star team. Assistant coach Billy Sample played major-league ball with the Rangers, Yankees and Braves in the 1970s and ’80s, batting .272 over the course of his nine-year career. Sample was brought to Fairbanks this season to instruct the Goldpanner hitters — and also dabble in a little public-relations work, sporting a wide smile and gentle laugh as he greeted fans at the gate as they filed into the park for the evening’s game against the Oilers. Sample seems to be on a first-name basis with many of them, some stopping to chat briefly with him before heading to their seats. It’s baseball at its roots. It’s the way the game was meant to be. It’s a slice of pastoral Americana in the harsh sub-arctic northland. FITTING IN WITH BASEBALL ROYALTY You would expect success with the kind of talent that has dotted the Goldpanners’ roster over the decades, and you would be right: The Goldpanners have won 29 league championships since their inception in 1960. They have also captured the National Baseball Congress title six times. It’s a rich heritage, and the Goldpanners are proud of it. Before trophies can be hoisted, however, players must first adjust to their foreign environment. In a very real sense, playing for the Goldpanners is something of a baseball boot camp. The players are thousands of miles from home; they are put up for the summer by families in the Fairbanks area; their teammates and coaches are total strangers; and they travel to their games by bus across Alaska’s vast expanses, some trips taking as long as nine hours as they wind through some of the most spectacular mountain and glacier scenery on Earth. Brian Lees (Tom Hardesty) FEELING AT HOME Go north of Fairbanks, and you almost instantly enter desolate wilderness that stretches for hundreds of miles. There is almost no road system leading north out of Alaska’s third-largest city, save for a remote two-lane stretch that becomes the famed Dalton Highway, a dirt-and-gravel route that snakes north through the tundra all the way to the Arctic Ocean. In other words, Fairbanks is one of the most isolated cities in the United States. In fact, the latitude where it sits on the globe is so far north that it is almost completely uninhabited planet-wide. Yet Fairbanks, home to the University of Alaska, is like any other college town in the country. Almost. “I didn’t know what to expect when I got here,” said Lees, a Cleveland-area native who graduated from Brunswick High School. “You watch shows like Alaskan Bush People and all that and you think that’s all that’s here, and then I get here and it’s not like that at all. There’s grocery stores and everything just like at home. “I definitely was impressed with what’s here. It’s not what everyone thinks Alaska is.” Indeed, while Fairbanks is nestled deep in the Alaskan frontier, it has all the trappings of middle America. It features a large, stateof-the art cinema on the main drag through town, pizza shops, the usual fast-food restaurants, various shopping plazas, a gourmet coffee shack seemingly in every parking lot, and even an international airport. Just enough creature comforts to keep a Midwesterner such as Lees feeling right at home. In fact, almost too at home despite the four-hour time difference from Alaska to Ohio. “I forget that sometimes,” he smiled. “I’ll grab my phone and start to text someone, and realize there’s no one there to text because they’re already in bed.” At the end of the day, though, it’s all about baseball for Lees and his Goldpanner teammates — and the hope that playing it in perhaps the most unique setting in all of sports will go a long way toward making their bigleague dreams come true. Like it has for so many before them. “I’m getting to play with guys from some of the top college programs in the country, schools like Pepperdine, UC Irvine, Arizona State,” said Lees. “This league is one of the top five in the country. It’s good competition. It’s challenging as a hitter because you’re facing a top-tier pitcher all the time, so you’ve got to be at the top of your game all the time. It’s just been a real good experience.” Tom Hardesty, For the Record-Courier Kent, Ohio Twitter: @TomHardestyRC Facebook: Tom Hardesty, Record-Courier
2016: Our 57th Season Return to Independent Barnstorming Schedule The 2016 season is a return to roots for the Goldpanners. For the first time since the early 1970s, the club is playing an entirely independent schedule. Due to an overlap between the Alaska Baseball League post-season and the National Baseball Congress World Series, the Panners have elected to focus attention on the tournament. Consequently, all Outside competition in 2016 is comprised of teams affiliated with the National Baseball Congress. The season begins in Seattle as the Panners face the Seattle Studs for a four-game series in Tacoma. The Studs were in Fairbanks in 2015 for the Midnight Sun Series, with all games being won by the Goldpanners including the 110th Midnight Sun Game. Following their stay in Fairbanks the Studs went on a spectacular run, eventually claiming the crown of the N.B.C. World Series. Once in Fairbanks, the Goldpanners will host the Kenai Peninsula Oilers of the Alaska Baseball League in the Midnight Sun Series. The highlight of this series will be the 111th Midnight Sun Game on June 21st. After the Oilers series Fairbanks will host the San Diego Barona Stars for a seven-game matchup. The Panners last faced the Stars in the 2013 Barona Bash Inviational Tournament. Fairbanks was victorious in the game and also in the tournament, coming out on top for their first of three titles on the year. Starting July 4th, the Goldpanners will take on the San Francisco Seals, another of the top independent teams in N.B.C. play. Finally, the Everett Merchants will return to Fairbanks for the final series of the season. Tim Kelly returns to Fairbanks for his sixth season and second as Field Mananger. In 1985, Kelly led the ABL champion Goldpanners all the way to the World Series in Wichita, Kansas. Prior to that, he was a pitcher and coach on the 1980 club, which dominated all competition and ultimately ran away with the N.B.C. championship. Tim was also the pitching coach for the 2012, 2013 and 2015 clubs. Player profiles are found on the following pages. TIM KELLY ON GROWDEN MEMORIAL PARK “I would like to provide an outside perspective to the issue of Growden Park. Most citizens of Fairbanks can’t possibly know the position your city holds in the baseball world. Getting an opportunity to play for the Goldpanners as a college player is like playing for the Yankees or the Dodgers, teams that have over the decades been at the top. If you were a Goldpanner you knew you were competing at the highest level of amateur baseball there was. Baseball legends and countless major leaguers played in Fairbanks. Getting to go to Fairbanks, Alaska to play is an incredible opportunity and validates your baseball pedigree. Playing in your city is the goal for college players. I have played, coached and managed for the Goldpanners. I helped the Panners win the NBC National Championship. The name Fairbanks Goldpanners is magic to baseball fans <strong>throughout</strong> the Lower 48 and they flock to see your team play. Virtually every baseball player in Fairbanks plays in that ballpark. It is the baseball beacon in faraway Alaska and deserves to continue.” TIM KELLY JAMIE SLUYS TYLER SLOAN For 35 years, Tim Kelly has been a pitching coach and scout. He was the pitching coach for six years at ASU as the Sun Devils won the 1981 College World Series in his first season. Kelly also worked at the highest levels in the scouting departments of the California Angels and Los Angeles Dodgers after his run at Arizona State. This brilliant man, who once attended Stanford University, was the hottest pitching coach in the nation in the early 1980s for ASU under Head Coach Jim Brock Jamie Sluys of Auburn, WA returns to Fairbanks for his third season. First on hand as an assistant to Jim Dietz in 2012, Jamie rejoined the organization in 2015, and was named Head Coach. This season, Jamie will fill the role of Associate Head Coach. Sluys has had a distinguished career as a player, as a Head Coach, and as an Athletic Director. Jamie is currently the Athletic Director and Head Baseball Coach at Muckleshoot High School -- a role he also held while at Northwest Indian College. Tyler Sloan joins the coaching staff following a pitching career in the Cal-State system. While at San Bernadino he was named CCAA All-Academic. He also pitched for Santa Ana during two season under Tim Kelly. In 2014, Tyler was 7-1 with a 3.06 ERA with 40 strikeouts. That season he helped the Dons win the 2014 Orange Empire League title, and was named the recipient of the Tim Boomer McConnon Award. Tyler earned his AA in liberal arts and American studies. He is now working on a degree in communications. 1980 ALASKA GOLDPANNERS OF FAIRBANKS LIVE BROADCASTS AT FACEBOOK.COM/GOLDPANNERS PITCHING COACH TIM KELLY (#9); FIELD MGR BEN HINES (#36) 5
Page 3 and 4: 111th W.G. & Eddie Stroecker Midnig
Page 5: JOHN LOHRKE NAMED FOURTH PRESIDENT
Page 9 and 10: Damian Powers has high expectations
Page 11 and 12: BASEBALL USED TO REBUILD FAIRBANKS
Page 13 and 14: 1964: Tom Seaver Auditions for U.S.
Page 15 and 16: Dan Pastorini Home Run Swing Floyd
Page 17 and 18: Chosen During the Team’s 55th Sea
Page 19 and 20: 1967: Mike Adamson First Goldpanner
Page 21 and 22: 1976: Andy Messersmith Becomes Firs
Page 23 and 24: Jason Giambi 21
Page 25 and 26: man” Lee 2008 Midnight Sun Game I
Page 27 and 28: Ryan Aguilar struggled in his first
Page 29 and 30: Rick Monday, 1964 THE GREATEST PLAY

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