At their most basic level, sports are silly games with nonsensical objectives that somehow manage to be insanely entertaining displays of human athletic achievement. Can you throw a ball through a hoop better than this other guy? Congratulations, you win basketball. But can you see the complex movements of 10 people running around, anticipate outcomes based on a set of rules, and then throw a ball through a hoop better than the other guy? Congratulations, you’re smart at basketball.
Being smart or good at a sport, though, ultimately doesn’t matter. You can’t make crops grow or water clean or babies healthy by hitting home runs or scoring touchdowns or amassing a multitude of fiddly wickets before tea time (I may or may not have a poor understanding of cricket). It’s this balance of in-the-moment drama with ultimately low stakes that make sports fun. It’s not like anyone’s going to lose their livelihood, catastrophically fail as a business, or die, right? Does typing that sentence mean all of those things are happening in this article? God, I hope not …
Baseball Team Of Death Row Inmates Gets Stay Of Executions (As Long As They Win)
Here’s a statement that shouldn’t be controversial but will probably still get me on some sort of list: America doesn’t treat its prisoners well. Prison life is a hellscape of abuse, violence, and forced labor. All you have to look forward to are the absolute basics: three meals a day, a bed to sleep in, and “an hour in the yard,” as they say.
Well, that “hour in the yard” trope wasn’t a thing for incarcerated people in the early years of the Wyoming State Penitentiary. Until the arrival of “compassionate” Sheriff Felix Alston, the prison just kept dudes cooped up inside, staring at walls and never seeing the sun. Alston started allowing outdoor time, and before long, pickup baseball games started (this was 1910 Wyoming, they weren’t cool enough to have basketball yet). After watching the prisoners play for a while, Alston exclaimed, “Golly Jake, the boys in this Hoosegow are quite hanging at this base-and-ball endeavor!” [citation needed] These murderers and horse thieves were cracking the bats on another lever, and Alston asked Governor Joseph Carey for permission to form a proper team.
The governor, a degenerate gambler, saw the opportunity for good publicity and quick cash, setting up an exhibition game with a local company team. The Wyoming Penitentiary All-Stars, as they were so named, promptly whomped a whole bunch o’ ass, beating the team 11-1. Gradually, public interest in the team began to build, and people started writing letters to the governor asking that the team, many of them sitting on death row, get lighter sentences.
Wyoming Dept. Of Corrections
Since this all sounds pretty nice so far — prisoners proving themselves in the field of play, potentially lighter sentences on the table — it is my sad duty to inform you that this is the part where everything goes to shit. Joseph Seng, a man who murdered pitches as eagerly as he, uh, murdered people, was rumored to be off death row. So other, non-baseball-playing prisoners tried to kill him themselves on his execution day. Team captain George Saban, another murderer, got to leave the prison and drink at bars all day, only to come back and threaten team members with added years if they played poorly. Things spiraled, with Wyomingians starting to wonder if Governor Carey was involved in some sort of gambling conspiracy. To save face, Alston canceled the team, and Carey ordered Seng’s execution — a full year after it was supposed to have been carried out.