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Day 6

'Everybody is just alive': Alaska's Midnight Sun baseball game is a bucket-list event for fans

Every year on the summer solstice, the Alaskan city of Fairbanks hosts a Midnight Sun baseball game. With nearly 24 hours of daylight on June 21, the game begins late at night and is played into the morning hours.
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The sun peeks over the horizon during the 2016 Midnight Sun game in Fairbanks, Alaska. (Courtesy Alaska Goldpanners)

Next week, travellers from all over the world will head to Fairbanks, Alaska — to watch a baseball game.

Summertime draws fans to ballparks across North America, but Fairbanks boasts a particularly unique baseball tradition. For more than a century, Fairbanks has celebrated the summer solstice with a Midnight Sun game, which continues through the midnight hour without ever using artificial lights.

      

An archival photo postcard shows a baseball game in Alaska in the summer of 1920. (Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)

Long-running ritual

The 'high noon at midnight' baseball game began in Fairbanks in 1906, and it's since become a ritual for the city's Alaska Goldpanners team to play the game each year on June 21.

With Fairbanks just 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle, the sun begins to set in the north as the game gets underway, and begins to rise three hours later as the game comes to its end. (The city usually gets nearly 22 hours of daylight on the solstice.)

The Goldpanners have hosted the game annually since their first year of competition in 1960 — the only longer-running baseball tradition is Major League Baseball's world series, and even that is just three years older than Fairbanks' solstice classic.

       

Alaska Goldpanners players get ready before the annual Midnight Sun game in 2016. (Courtesy Alaska Goldpanners)

Ray of light

For Fairbanks' denizens, the game is a way to reflect on the passing of another year — and the survival of another long winter.

The game has rarely been called because of darkness — though it was postponed last year as storm clouds rolled in during the Goldpanners' match against the Kenai Peninsula Oilers. Umpires called a 30-minute delay at 1 a.m. to give the sun time to come back up over the horizon.

                                                        

A batter up at plate during the 2016 Midnight Sun classic at Growden Park in Fairbanks, Alaska. (Courtesy Alaska Goldpanners)

Treasured tradition

This year's game takes place on Wednesday, June 21 beginning at 10 p.m. at Fairbanks' Growden Park, with the Goldpanners facing off against the San Diego Waves.

As the Goldpanners get ready to host the 112th edition of the game on the longest day of the year, the team's general manager, John Lohrke, tells Day 6 what it's like to play under the midnight sun.

"What makes this game so special, I think, is the fact that nowhere else has this happened. If you're a baseball fan, this is one of the things you have to do," Lohrke says. "There's a lot that goes on in town the entire week — there's a Midnight Sun run, there are lots of vendors downtown. It's amazing what the sun will do for your energy when it's up so much during the summer days here.

"It seems like so much focus is given to one game," he continues. "But there's so much that goes into a summer, with these coaches, these kids coming up … the summer parents that these kids stay with develop some really strong bonds with the kids, and stay in touch [with them]. The game just sort of is the culmination of all that."

                                         

                                            

To hear John Lohrke's audio snapshot of Fairbanks' Midnight Sun game, download our podcast or click the 'Listen' button at the top of this page.

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