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

Hartson Bodfish checked the thermometer again, tapping it with his right hand.

It couldn't be this cold, could it?

But the numbers stayed true. The arrows didn't move.

It was minus-50 degrees Celsius. Negative 58 degrees Fahrenheit. Fifty below zero.

No matter how you put it, it was bone-chillingly, not-fit-for-human-being-living freezing. Too cold to leave your bedroom. Too cold to go outside. Too cold to even think about going outside.

But Captain Bodfish knew he had to go out.

He picked up the canvas piece cut out from a sail, scooped a bag of ash from the ship's stove and made his way out to the icy Pauline Cove. He stuck the canvas in the ground and began sprinkling the black soot in a line and, eventually, in a shape resembling a diamond. The whaler, hailing from Tisbury, Mass., paused to look up into the endless Canadian snowscape.

The sun began to rise, the sky was a clear blue and Bodfish, suddenly not as cold as he was minutes ago, felt a little bit better about the day. It would be a good one. There was a baseball game to be played.

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.

"Some guys developed a technique where they'd just lie down on the ice to block the ball," Firth laughed.

The matches even had fans: The Inuit -- natives to this part of the world -- were extremely interested in the games. They hadn't seen anything like it before. They'd stand off to the sides, cheering on a favorite player or team. Sometimes, they got a little bit too involved in the action.

"When they realized that a guy would hit the ball and have to run to a base, they [would] decide they liked the guy who was fielding the ball more than the guy who was running to the base," Firth told me. "They would run out there and hold the baserunner until the fielder had a chance to field the ball."

There was one very peculiar rule in the Herschel Island League: Ballgames had to be played no matter the weather. A strange stipulation in a place that could be, for much of the winter, a barren, frozen wasteland. A spot on the globe where a blizzard could appear out of nowhere, winds could blow giant ships way off course and temperatures could drop 30 degrees in an hour's time.

"Yeah, the weather conditions in Pauline Cove could change dramatically in a heartbeat," Firth said. "Players would freeze to death out on the ice."

That sadly happened on many occasions. More from "UpHere, The Voice of Canada's Far North":

Five men were killed during a baseball game when, with the weather unseasonably mild, a blizzard suddenly hit and the temperature dropped to -30 C. Men scrambled back to their ships but three sailors and two Inuit fans were lost and froze to death.

As noted by Sports Illustrated, one stranded player eventually crawled back to his ship, where 15 pounds of ice had to be chopped away from his hood.

"The fog rolled in -- you couldn't even see home plate from second base," Firth told me. "But you still had to play baseball. You had to go by the sound of the bat."

Daylight was also an issue during prime winter months, causing more issues with gameplay and fielders to get lost or left behind.

"When the days got shorter, they'd cut the games from nine to four innings," Firth said. "They were above the Arctic Circle, so they never got a day. All they got was twilight certain times of the year. The sun never rose."

Fights were also common -- including a man being stabbed because of a disagreement regarding the field dimensions.

The league seemed to hit its high point in 1895 and, as time went on and the whaling industry collapsed in the early 1900s, ballplaying in this far, far northern locale tapered off. Herschel Island's ballfields disappeared under snow and ice, as though they'd never been there at all. The area once again became a frigid, desolate terrain where only the most hardened explorers ventured.

Firth says baseball has come and gone in the Yukon area for the last century or so -- never really sticking. Softball was introduced by Americans during World War II and has become a popular pastime in the warmer months.

Still, Herschel Island and Pauline Cove will always be known for hosting the coldest hardball circuit the world has ever known. A sport stranded fishermen toiled in, and took joy in playing, nearly 200 miles above the Arctic Circle. As Bodfish penned in his daily journal:

“Captains, mates, harpooners and cooks mates, if there were any, played, if they happened to be the best players. ... It was the game that was desired, and nothing else mattered.”