Watch Alex Ovechkin strike out, perhaps re-popularize ice baseball

I don't know much about hockey, but I do know that Alexander Ovechkin is very good at it. After all, he has led the NHL in goals in four separate seasons, something that (I'm guessing) is very difficult to do. At the NHL All-Star skills competition on Saturday, Ovechkin tried to win the Breakaway Challenge by taking a few hacks at a lobbed puck. After all, how different could a hockey stick really be from a baseball bat? 

Turns out, very. Ovechkin whiffed harder than Mighty Casey and went down on three swings, even coming up empty after switching to a goalie's larger stick.

But what Ovechkin may have done is re-discover ice baseball. No longer will we baseball fans have to shiver endlessly while waiting for the sport to return to us. Instead, perhaps Ovechkin will be the face of a sport that has ties back to the late 1800s in Alaska when teams of whalers, "trapped " by the bay's ice over winter, used ashes to lay "out a baseball diamond."

(via Library of Congress)

While we may not see the kind of kind of frozen wind-aided 62-to-49 scores like an 1894 matchup of the Roaring Gimlets vs. the Pig Stickers (names that I would very much like to see return), it's time that baseball fans have the opportunity to sit back and watch ballplayers try and hit a baseball while standing on ice skates. After hitting the ball, the player would have to circle the entire rink without being hip-checked to score. And instead of the seventh-inning stretch, there will be seventh inning zambonis. 

I tell you, it's perfect. Now we just need a few investors to get this thing going. Who's in?