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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

34. Keeping the Team Focused

Joseph Guzzardo, the Alston All Stars shortstop. Death Row All Stars

Team captain George Saban made sure to keep the Alston All Stars focused. During team practice, following some poor plays from shortstop Joseph Guzzardo, the convict captain and warden’s friend let everybody know the consequences of screw-ups. As the team’s star player and death row inmate Joseph Seng described the pep talk in a letter he wrote from prison:

“Mistakes on the field would not be tolerated … He [Saban] told us that prisoners who make errors that cost the team a game would have more time added to their sentence. Winning would lead to reduced time and stays of execution“. In his capacity as bookie, Saban also made sure this information was communicated to the town’s gamblers, so they would know that the players were playing for their lives. Winning was one way to prolong a death row inmate’s time.

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.