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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

35. The Killer Team Killed Its Opponents – This Time, Figuratively

Alston All Stars star player Joseph Seng was on death row for killing his lover’s husband. Daily Mail

As a baseball team, the death row Alston’s All Stars were not bad. In their first game, played on July 18^th, 1911, they thumped their opponents, the Wyoming Supply Company Juniors ball club, 11-1. The Washington Post reported under the headline SLAYER SCORES HOMES RUNS: “Joseph Seng, right fielder for the Alstons, 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“.

The Carbon County Journal, which described the team as The Cons, wrote of the star right fielder: “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“. Seng’s play impressed journalists and watchers, but it failed to move Wyoming’s governor.

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.