Wyoming, 1911, the sun shines down on a baseball
diamond as a pitcher throws a fastball that doesn’t go in the intended direction. He stamps
a foot on the ground, enraged that he’s messed up again. What he does over the course of this game
is literally a matter of life and death. He’s not just playing to win. He’s playing to survive.
As are his teammates, all convicted felons playing for the Wyoming State Penitentiary All Stars
in the city of Rawlins. Murderers, robbers, men who’ve committed heinous crimes against the
vulnerable, playing like seasoned professionals. This rag-tag bunch of thugs and killers can play,
there’s no doubt about that, but the question is, can they win their way to a new life?
Let’s go back to start. When the Wyoming State Penitentiary was opened
in 1901 it was one tough place. This was a time when the West was still called Wild and outlaws
pervaded the land. Still, not long before the prison was opened, you could say that criminals
faced a rougher kind of justice if apprehended. Take for instance the story of the killer and
robber, Big Nose George Parrott. He was arrested in 1881 and was sent to the local jail in Rawlins.
Big nose, who certainly had quite the snout, must have thought his luck was in when he
was busted out of that jail, but it turned out that his rescuers were a local lynch mob.
Those townsfolks weren’t willing to wait for the authorities to deal with him. Around 200 of
them strung Parrott up from a telegraph pole. Physicians managed to get hold of his body, but
get this, his skull ended up being someone’s ashtray and parts of his skin were made into
a death mask and a pair of shoes. The third Governor of the State of Wyoming, Mr. John Eugene
Osborne, actually wore them to his inaugural ball. If that sounds grim, you should know that
many crazy things went down in those days. Opening a penitentiary and housing prisoners
there was somewhat more progressive than mob rule. Still, if you found yourself locked up around
the time of the beginning of the 20th century, you could be sure that you weren’t
getting much sympathy from the townspeople you had stolen from, beaten up or killed.
No one blinked an eye when rustlers and murderers were treated inhumanely by a well-respected,
eminently wealthy businessman named Otto Gramm. You could say that this man made hay while
the frontier crime rate was off the scales. He had a contract with the prison in the
early days and pretty much ran the place. For every criminal that entered the prison he
received fifty-seven cents per day per prisoner from the state, but he also ran the prison’s
broom factory and took all the profits from that. Inmates at the time complained that
Gramm was a man from the Dark Ages, saying that he made the men work ungodly hours
and barely fed them. They drank out of tomato cans and were given just enough food to
prevent starvation. Rancid food at that. So, in that first decade of the 1900s,
Wyoming State Penitentiary was hell on Earth, but for Mr. Gramm it was a goose laying a lot
of golden eggs. Not surprisingly, morale in the prison was low. Prisoners had tried to escape
and were killed while doing so. They killed each other, and on occasions, guards were murdered.
In 1911, the progressive senator Joseph Carey campaigned to get rid of Gramm and after
he won the governor’s race he made Sheriff Felix Alston the big boss in the prison.
This man, who’d been a gold miner, a water and ice man, a farmer, a national Park guide and
justice of the peace before becoming a sheriff, didn’t not believe that working the prisoners
close to death was the way to fix their wicked ways. The broom days were over, and instead of
hard labor, prisoners were educated and also entered intense physical fitness programs.
When they weren’t doing those things, they were sent out in gangs to fix the state’s roads.
This was a breath of fresh air to the prisoners, some of whom had never even been outside since
the prison opened. They were no longer making brooms and pining for a square meal but were being
fed and enjoying activities in the prison yard. What activity did they enjoy the most? Baseball
of course, the USA’s favorite sport at the time. One day warden Alston was watching the men play
and he thought, “Goddamnit, some of those men aint half bad.” In fact, he mused while watching
men hit balls over the wall and throw curveballs, that some of them would stand a
chance of becoming professional. Alston got talking to his old friend, governor
Carey, and asked him if it would be ok if the prison formed a baseball team. Carey wondered
if forming a prison team could be a bit of fun and he gave Alston the greenlight.
Carey was also partial to gambling. This will tie into the story soon.
The men were bought brand new uniforms and practiced as if they were professional
players. They called themselves “The Wyoming State Penitentiary All Stars” and while the
public thought the whole thing was a farce, the inmates would not only prove them wrong but
would change the public’s perception of them. One person that absolutely hated the
fact the team had been made was Gramm, who still held the belief that prisoners needed
to be treated like animals. Not only that, he had hopes that one day he might start
his ultra-profitable broom operation again. It was arranged that the All Stars would
play their first game against a local team called the Wyoming Supply Company Juniors. No one
gave them a chance of course, because how could prison criminal vermin organize themselves
and beat a team filled with real athletes. Imagine hearing the line-up, Leroy Cooke is at
first. He bludgeoned to death a barber and stole his money. On second, George Saban, convicted
of second-degree murder. On third, Jack Carter, who shot and killed an old hermit, cut him up
and burned his remains in the fireplace. Pitcher, William Boyer, stabbed his father
to death with a letter opener. The date was set. On July 18, 1911, a team
consisting of murderers, rapists, a forger and five thieves, would go up against the
mighty Wyoming Supply Company Juniors. Alston had high hopes, so high that he put
down quite a large bet that his team would win. The stakes were also high for the team.
If you won this game, they might well get time off their sentence. But if they made
a mistake that cost the team the win, well, no time off and not much chance of them having
their sentence commuted. That meant a life or death game for some of the death row prisoners,
and by God, they took it seriously. They didn’t want to end up having their skin made into a pair
of shoes, a story that no doubt haunted them. They didn’t just win the game, a game
against one of the best teams in the area, they absolutely trounced their opponents and
they did it playing with style and as gentlemen. The final score was 11-1 to the All Stars. They
were over the moon, not only because they’d achieved something great, but because it was
looking like hard time was about to get softer. The outstanding player on the team
was Joseph Seng. He hit two home runs, with one being a grand slam. If you’re not a
baseball fan that means hitting a homerun when there are men on bases one, two and three, thereby
scoring four runs. It’s about as good as it gets. The newspapers the next day were busy
publishing stories about a bunch of convicts that had somehow turned into formidable
baseball players. Referring to Seng, The Washington Post wrote, “Slayer Scores Home
Runs.” The first paragraph read, “Joseph Seng, right fielder is under sentence to be hanged.
Seng made two home runs hit over the penitentiary wall. One of his hits cleared the bases,
bringing in three others and scoring himself.” Seng was on death row for killing
his supervisor in the street, well, the victim wasn’t only his supervisor. He was
also the husband of the woman that Seng loved. This is what another newspaper wrote about him:
“Joseph Seng, who was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death, played
a classy game all the way through. He will petition the governor to commute his sentence
to life imprisonment sometime this month.” In fact, when people read about Seng’s
brilliance a lot of them sympathized with him. Ok, he had killed a man, but some people said,
hey, he isn’t exactly public enemy number one, he killed out of love, and man, he’s a great
athlete, surely the state could commute his death penalty. Rumors started to catch fire. Word on
the street was that if Seng could keep on playing like a star then he might just get what he wants.
But there were others on the team that hoped for some mercy for their efforts. One of them was
captain George Saban. The tale thickens here. You see, Saban was arrested after he’d killed
three sheep herders. He’d snuck up on them one night and shot them all dead, which really were
cold-blooded killings. The thing was, though, those slayings were part of a long dispute between
herders and cattle ranchers that had taken other lives. These conflicts were known as the “Sheep
Wars”. There were actually local politicians that thought Saban was in the right for doing what he’d
done. Let’s not forget, this was the wild west. Another thing was the fact that Saban was actually
a friend of the prison warden, Alston. It had been Alston that had arrested him, and while he
didn’t want to put a close friend behind bars, he didn’t really have much choice. He got 25 years
for his crime but was made the captain of the team and was also allowed to leave the prison at times.
What did he do when he was on the outside, you might wonder?
Well, much of his free time was spent going around to the local saloons
and brothels and talking to men who liked to make bets. He told them all about his crack team
of players and just how good Seng was. Saban would take twenty percent of their winnings if
they bet. He was also in cahoots with Alston, whose money he used to place bets of his own.
Well, when Mr. Gramm the broom-man got wind of this he was at first appalled and then later
he wondered if he couldn’t report the matter. He got in touch with Senator Francis Warren, a
man who was hoping to oust Carey as governor. While Gramm had no proof that Carey was in
on the betting, he believed it to be true. Meanwhile, the guys on the team were having
the time of their lives. They were eating better food than the rest of the prisoners and
they moved more freely around the prison. They played the same team again, and they won easily.
Superstar Seng was man of the hour another time, hitting balls left, right and center. The
score was the same as the first time, 11-1. But as prisons go – even today – one
man’s good luck is another man’s torment. Seng was to be executed soon even though he still
had the public on his side; even though he was winning games. Then one day an envious prisoner
thought that he’d move forward that execution date all by himself. He saw Seng sitting on a
landing at the bottom of some stairs, and with an iron ball fastened to his legs, he climbed to
the level above Seng and pushed over a heavy box of sand. It would have hit and killed Seng had
he not at the right moment moved to the side. They won their next game, 11-4, and again Seng
was the standout player, hitting home runs with as much ease as a Major League player playing
against a junior high school team. Three games to zero, and Seng was the hero every time.
Surely, they’d not hang him by a rope. As the team were basking in their glory, inmates
had been trying to escape. Having a baseball team practising in the prison and going out for games
wasn’t making life easy for the guards. It created more chaos. Seng also now needed to be protected,
which took up even more of the guards’ time. It wasn’t really his fault, but it bugged some
of the inmates that he was getting special treatment. His execution date arrived and lo
and behold, he wasn’t sent to the gallows. Some inmates gossiped that the only reason
that happened was because he was due to play and was making a lot of money for... someone.
They won their fourth game against the same team, but not with as much ease as they’d won their
other games, with the final score being 15-10. Over the course of 15-months they won time
and again, racking up a record of 39 wins to 6 losses, with each game being played in
front of raucous supporters. In total, $136,000 had been bet on them, which is almost
four million in today’s money. It’s thought a lot of the winnings went into the pockets of local
politicians and their election campaign funds. The heat was on Governor Corey, a man whose
reputation was at risk after Gramm had started those rumors about him placing bets. It’s
likely because of that, that Corey announced that he was cracking down on gambling.
Soon after, the All Stars were a thing of the past. Alston said that baseball would
be replaced with educational programs, which seems to have suited a lot of
the other prisoners not on the team. As for superstar Seng, well, he at least got to
live a little longer than he would have if he hadn’t hit balls out of the park. It wasn’t good
enough, though, and he was hanged on May 24, 1912. 350 locals had petitioned the governor to
commute his sentence, but it didn’t work. The man that once hit a ball through a third-story
window in the guards’ quarters of the prison wasn’t going to escape the dreaded noose.
Before his death he Seng said, “I never received a square deal until I was brought to
the penitentiary.” He was grateful for having been able to play the game he loved, at least for
a short while. At 2.45 am, the moonlight shining on the gallows, he took his final breath.
The local newspaper wrote the next day, “His steps were steady, and he went to his death
in a manner which stamped him as a brave man.” Now you need to watch this, “You DON'T Want
To Be Sent To This Prison (Worst Prison In The World In 2019)”. Or have a look at this, “Why
Nobody Can Escape From Guantanamo Bay Prison.”
