SPARKS, Nev. — 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."
