North Pole Nicks

The North Pole Nicks, based in North Pole, Alaska, played in the Alaska Baseball League from 1980 through 1991. This was amateur collegiate summer baseball rather than minor league play, a wood-bat circuit where college players spent their offseasons, and it produced a long list of future major leaguers over the years. 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. For the first several seasons the Nicks actually 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. In 1985 the Nicks reached the final of the National Baseball Congress World Series at Lawrence-Dumont Stadium in Wichita, losing 6-2 to the Liberal BeeJays of Kansas. The following summer they won the Alaska Baseball League championship outright. Mike Gillespie managed the club from 1983 through 1985 and went on to win the 1998 College World Series at Southern California.

North Pole folded after the 1987 season, sat out a year, then returned for three more seasons beginning in 1989 under managers Mike Studer and Emmitt Wilson. Jerry McClain, Dan Cowgill, Frank Sanchez and Jim Gattis also managed during the franchise's run. Alaska has never hosted a minor league team, which makes the Nicks about as close as the state has come to a defunct professional club of its own.