Vintage Alaska Shirts: Defunct Alaska Baseball Teams
Alaska has never hosted a minor league team. What it has had since the 1960s is the Alaska Baseball League, a wood-bat circuit where college players spend their summers, and the closest thing the state has to a defunct professional club of its own is the North Pole Nicks, who played there from 1980 through 1991. The Nicks were amateur collegiate summer baseball, not minor league ball, and we say so plainly because the distinction is the whole reason the team is interesting.
The nickname is short for Saint Nicholas, after the town that named itself for the home of Santa Claus. Don Dennis founded the club in 1980, and for the first several seasons the Nicks played their home games at Growden Memorial Park in Fairbanks, about fifteen miles up the highway, until Wright Field was built in North Pole itself. The peak came in the middle of the decade: a run to the final of the National Baseball Congress World Series in Wichita in 1985, a 6-2 loss there to the Liberal BeeJays, and an Alaska Baseball League championship the following summer. Mike Gillespie managed from 1983 through 1985 and went on to win the 1998 College World Series at Southern California. The club folded after 1987, sat out a year, and came back for three more seasons beginning in 1989. Our vintage Alaska shirts honor these defunct clubs with original designs grounded in real research.
The team below links to its own collection, where you can read the full history and shop shirts, hoodies, and crewnecks for that club.
