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The Death Row Baseball Team and Other Odd Episodes in History

Khalid Elhassan May 18, 2020 34 min

Death Row All Stars: A Story of Baseball, Corruption, and Murder - State Penitentiary — Alston's All Stars. Daily Mail

39. From the Baseball Diamond to Death Row Was Not That Far

A college baseball team in 1910. University of Chicago Archives

In the early twentieth century, baseball was the game in America, and just about everybody who was into sports and athletics played or watched or did both. Back then, many players associated with the professional clubs, majors, minors, or semi-pros, had reputations as hooligans, ruffians, or worse… death row inmates.

So as a simple matter of statistics, there was a steady infusion of professional baseball players who ended up behind bars for offenses minor or serious. Of the serious offenses, some were serious enough to land some pretty decent players on death row. Wyoming’s State Penitentiary in Rawlins had a warden, Felix Alston, who was a big time baseball lover. So he decided to make use of the available talent to form a team, which came to be known as Alston’s All Stars – including death row inmates.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.