Their Field of Dreams Is Piled High With Snow

Eliseo Montenegro found his pitch on an 0-2 count, with runners on first and second.

The second baseman for AJ’s Pizzeria rapped the ball to left -- solid, nothing special. Or so he thought. Instead, he found his base coach, Brian Williford, wheeling his arm like a windmill and his teammates shouting: “Go! Go! Keep running!”

Out in left, Jeff Shults was in trouble. “I need some help here!” he yelled to fellow outfielders for Traditional Home Builders. “I can’t find the ball!”

It was gone. Vanished into a foot of snow. A misty plume of icy fog rose off the field, making the hunt harder. The men clawed through the powder to no avail. Montenegro circled the bases with a three-run homer.

So it goes in the Deep Freeze League of Sparks, 28 teams of softball fanatics who vow to play in any weather. This winter, they’ve played in temperatures as low as 15 degrees and in snow as deep as 42.7 inches.

“It’s completely zany out there,” said Montenegro, 34, who after the game cheerfully conceded that his at-bat would have had a different ending in summer.

“I’m thinking maybe he catches it, maybe it’s a single,” said Montenegro, owner of a Reno collection agency. “But in this league, anything can wind up as a home run.”

The snow and ice have given the game a whole new meaning to the term “slide” and consigned the idea of a routine grounder to meaninglessness. More recently, a frigid fog has hovered over northern Nevada. Called pogonip, a Shoshone Indian word interpreted by some to mean “white death,” the fog coated trees and playing fields in a spectral haze.

But still the Deep Freezers play on, their puffs of breath visible as they charge around the field. Some wear shorts and a team T-shirt. Others wear sweats and a pullover; few wear parkas or other winter gear. Although they wear cleats, getting traction in snowy and icy conditions is a quixotic enterprise.

“You have to know what you’re doing out there,” said Devon Decker, 30, an administrator at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation agency. She played left-centerfield and hit a triple and a double in a 21-20 loss for her team, UC Tail, on a field adjoining the one where AJ’s and THB battled.

“There was snow up to my knees tonight,” Decker said. “You can’t really run on it. You run through it.”

The 7-year-old Wednesday night league is sticking to a tradition that games should never be canceled. (They were called off once -- but that was because of a power outage, not the weather.)

“No way,” Tony Pehle, Sparks recreation supervisor and de facto commissioner of the league, said when asked if another huge powder dump from the Sierra Nevada or blast of Arctic air might force him to call off games.

“In fact, the players are excited about it,” Pehle said.

“They’re all saying, ‘This is what we’ve been waiting for,’ ” he said. “They’re like little kids out there.”

Albeit kids warmed by Coors.

“This is more of a beer league,” Mike Bell, 22, said in explaining how Deep Freeze softball differs from the summer version.

“Actually, come to think of it, I guess that’s a beer league too,” said Bell, a tile salesman who plays several positions for Just Enough.

Few players said they preferred winter softball to the summer variety, but many said it beat staying indoors and cursing another long winter night.

“It’s not so bad once you get out there and start running around, actually,” said Jim Brent, a woodworker who plays right field for AJ’s Pizzeria. “Riding the bench is rough, though.”

There are important differences, strategic and otherwise, between winter and summer ball, players say.

For one thing, pitchers have less control.

“It’s tougher,” said Abe Croney, 27, a drywaller by day and a pitcher for THB by night. “You can’t feel your fingers.”

It’s tough for batters too; the rap of a cold aluminum bat on the ball can create a dreadful sensation in the hands -- “the sting,” they call it.

Even with bone-chilling cold and eight times the normal snowfall for the first two weeks of January in the Truckee Meadow valley, the most since 1916, average scores have gone up this season. That’s because a lot of grounders and line drives are getting buried in the snow and ordinary fly balls are getting lost in the icy haze, even though the ball is neon yellow.

“I had a bead on it -- I really did,” outfielder Shults said of Montenegro’s drive. “I lost it in the fog and the lights. Plus, your eyes get so glossy in this cold.”

Because highly informal league rules seem to prohibit any clearing of the field other than around home plate, the bases and the pitcher’s mound, nobody can really sprint to field a ball. Shults made a valiant face-flop dive into the snow where he thought that Montenegro’s drive would land.

“Maybe I should have held up and let it land,” said Shults, 30. “But that goes against your instincts.”

In the game pitting AJ’s against THB, several other balls went similarly astray in the snow, and the pizzeria squad wound up in a come-from-behind win in the bottom of the fifth and final inning, 21-18. (Games can go a full seven innings but are time-limited to 1 hour, 10 minutes.)

The league is one of the most extensive in cold-weather territory, but it’s small compared with the 335 teams that play here in balmier seasons. The league is dominated by men in their 20s and 30s.

“These are guys at the top of their game,” said Chris Spann, 27, a lumber salesman from Reno who plays infield and outfield for AJ’s Pizzeria. “They’re hard-core.”

There are also a few women no less driven by the love of the game.

Decker, the UC Tail player, said she plays for multiple softball teams each year, although she limits herself to just one in winter. “It’s fun, but it can get a little dangerous out there on the icy spots.”

Decker sported a six-stitch cut on her lip, although she explained that it came not from softball but from a recent flag-football tournament in Las Vegas.

Winter ball certainly has its special charms -- what Stan John, 35, a tile setter and slugger for Just Enough, refers to as “the smell of the propane tank and the roar of the crowd.”

The first reference was to the portable heaters that most teams keep at the edge of their bench -- although their primary use seems to be to warm the aluminum bats, not the players.

The second reference was facetious.

“I think they’re insane,” said Shannon Johnston, huddled up in blankets as she watched from the frigid steel risers behind the backstop. Johnston, who was there to watch a friend play, was one of two spectators at the AJ’s game. The other, Dominique Brent, wife of AJ’s right fielder James Brent, said she came out of spousal loyalty.

The league is the brainstorm of Brian Bessette, operations superintendent for the Sparks Parks and Recreation Department.

He was out for a winter jog in 1998 when he gazed over the cold, empty diamonds and had a “Field of Dreams”-style revelation.

“I just thought, ‘Why not?’ ” Bessette recalled. “Let’s play in all weather, no matter what the conditions. I wanted to call it Totally Whacked-Out Softball.”

The recreation department chose Deep Freeze instead.

In the first year, the league fielded 24 teams. Games take place from early January to early March. The number of teams keeps growing, with players coming from as far away as Truckee, across the state line in California, and from hamlets across the northern Sierra.

“We’ve had teams chain up to get down the hill to play and then chain up to get back,” Pehle said.

The team holding the best record after the eight-game season receives embroidered Sparks sweatshirts and what parks officials describe as “the coveted ice-cube trophy.”

Umpires get $17 a game, just as in summer -- “no winter bonus, no hazard pay,” Pehle said.

In one way, though, the commissioner said, umpires have it easier this time of year.

“We haven’t had a single ejection yet,” Pehle said.

“In summer, you get all kinds, including the weekend-warrior types who are thinking this is the World Series and want to argue with every call,” he said. “In Deep Freeze, people just want to have a good time.”