Minus-50 degrees? The coldest winter league you've never heard of

Back in 1894, North American whaling crews -- marooned up near the Yukon Territory's Herschel Island in Pauline Cove, awaiting the ice to thaw out so they could get back out on the sea -- started up the world's coldest baseball league. A way to keep them from fighting each other, drinking too much and, well, simply being bored out of their minds.

"It started out as soccer, but then somebody discovered a cache of baseball bats and baseballs in the hull of a ship," John Firth, author of Yukon Sport: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, told me in a phone call. "So basically, they created seven teams and created their own trophy, which was called the Arctic Whalemen's Pennant -- basically a piece of canvas nailed to a broomstick."

Some of the teams had names like the Herschels, the Northern Lights, the Arctics and the Roaring Gimlets. The games were of an equalizing nature: Officers played with mechanics, cooks played with captains. The whalers were from all over the place -- China, Japan, the U.S., Malaysia, eastern Europe and Canada. The league provided a great way to socialize and compete with people you may never have interacted with on the ship. Bodfish and others kept logs of the games that have lasted to this day.

The crew did have bats and balls, but for many other elements of the game, they had to improvise. They laid down baselines with ash from the kitchen stoves, they hoisted sails as backstops and they used their snow mitts as baseball mitts.

"The ball was frozen solid," Firth said. "A routine pop fly could damage their hands."

Gameplay, as you might imagine when playing baseball on sea ice, was not pretty. Fly balls would move every which way in the high winds and raging snow. Ground balls would sometimes roll forever and disappear into the white abyss. Many scores would end in complete blowouts, like 85-10 or 65-2. A few fielders did whatever they could to make plays.

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