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The rural town Turner, Mont., has the distinction of being the farthest of any town in America from a Major League Baseball stadium. WSJ's Conor Dougherty reports on how the tiny town is working around this.

TURNER, Mont.—Thursday marks the 137th Opening Day of Major League Baseball and no fans in the lower 48 states are farther from the roar of the crowd than the 61 residents here.

As the crow flies, the Seattle Mariners are 648 miles away; Denver's Colorado Rockies, 650 miles. Earlier this year, residents discovered they were the answer to a trivia question locals had never thought to ask: What sorry town in the contiguous U.S. is farthest from a major league stadium?

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Jim Reed, 83, was a pitcher for a Turner, Mont., team in the 1950s.

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Turner has gravel roads and no stoplights. Adding insult to injury, the town of late has had trouble fielding any kind of team, much less the 18 players required for America's pastime.

"We barely have enough people for basketball," said Steve Humphreys, a local farmer.

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This summer will be Turner's centennial. As part of the celebration, the town will try to round up enough players for pickup games at the old ball field on the edge of town, which has views of wheat fields and the two-lane road to Canada. Baseball has become a reminder of the town's long population decline, echoed in shrinking rural communities across the U.S.

It wasn't always this way. In the 1950s, Turner had about 400 people. Back then Jim Reed, 83 years old, pitched for the local team. He is a lot slower now and doesn't respond to questions that aren't yelled into his ear. But he has little trouble remembering the day he played two games in Canada and one more in nearby Harlem, Mont. Mr. Reed pitched all three and won two—not with an overpowering fastball, he said, but by throwing strikes.

Mr. Reed's family owns Reed's Elevator, a grain elevator that was the tallest structure around until a cellphone tower was erected earlier this year. His office is decorated with two Minnesota Twins pennants. The Twins, some 750 miles away in Minneapolis, are the third-closest team to Turner.

"I suppose it was around 1960 when we ran out of people to play," said Mr. Reed. He wagged a crooked left index finger to show off what remains of his amateur pitching career.

Opening Day generates optimism, said one baseball pundit, like a first meeting of Weight Watchers. Turner is no exception. "It's a sign that spring is coming along," said Kent Heilig, a 34-year-old farmer, "and we've always got hopes that our teams will do good this year."

Mr. Humphreys and Mr. Reed's son, Steve, kept local baseball going by switching from hardball games to a coed, slow-pitch softball team that played nearby towns and made regular trips to Canada. As the population fell, the games dwindled from a few a week to one a week. By the early 1990s, they had stopped entirely.

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Jim Reed is second from the left in the back row.

Behind Turner's baseball dilemma is a longtime decline in farm employment. Children leave for college and don't come back. Even if they wanted to stay, there are few jobs for them. Modern farming is so efficient that Mr. Humphreys sometimes reads Stephen King novels in his tractor: GPS has relieved him of the need to steer.

The town tries to stitch together summer games, coached by Mr. Heilig, recruiting players as young as five years old and people well into their 60s. It requires some accommodation. Young kids, for instance, use a tee at bat.

Parents and children sometimes man their positions together. The rule is, only adults get adults out; vice versa for kids. They tried a game of adults versus children. To even the playing field, right-handed grown-ups had to bat lefty and left-handed adults went righty. Adults had to run bases backward, facing home plate while running to first, for example.

The player shortage triggers all sorts of rule-breaking. "We've had times where all the batters are on the bases so you have to advance a runner just to get a batter up," said Mr. Humphreys. "You do what you do to make it work."

Turner residents learned of their place in baseball lore this winter. Their far-flungedness title surfaced in "Flip Flop Fly Ball," a book of baseball trivia and history by Craig Robinson published last year. Sports bloggers in January began poking fun at Turner online—from its 14-student high school to its nonprofit organization, "The Big Flat Community Grain Bin," created to stem population decline.

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In this historic photo, Jim Reed is in the back row, with arms crossed.

"I made them pretty unhappy for a cheap joke," said Reuben Fischer-Baum, who has since apologized to Turner for writing a post headlined, "The saddest town in America" on his blog, "A Sports Nation Divided."

Despite the difficulty of playing baseball in a town that has fewer people than fit in a large school bus, baseball remains Tracer Heilig's favorite sport. The 11-year-old Turner boy has never played the game by its official rules, but he joins in the intergenerational softball games and watches major league games on TV.

On a recent afternoon, Tracer was wearing a Chicago Cubs jersey under a brown jumpsuit embroidered with a tractor and "4th Generation Farm Kid." His nine-year-old brother, Ethan, was in a matching jumpsuit but sporting a Boston Red Sox cap.

Naturally, the brothers are rooting for a Sox vs. Cubs matchup in the World Series this year. "We both argue which is the best," Tracer says. Meanwhile, 945 miles away in Las Vegas, Jay Kornegay, vice president of race and sports betting at the Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, puts 250-to-1 odds on that.

On Opening Day, at least, anything is possible.

Write to Conor Dougherty at conor.dougherty@wsj.com