dennis yang dot com

I’ve been meaning to write this up for awhile now.. and finally am now.

So, on Saturday, June 13th, I had one of the best baseball days of my life. We traveled to San Quentin (yes, the prison) to play the inmates. It was an awesome and surreal experience, and one that I will not soon forget. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to bring any cameras inside the prison, so I have no photos from the game itself, but I do have this shot from outside the prison gates.

Nestled on a gorgeous piece of bay front property (probably worth boatloads of $$$ even in today’s lagging real estate market), San Quentin is an old, creepy, scary kind of place. Built in 1852, it’s the oldest prison in the state, the gate that we walked through looked clearly like it was built in a different era, all old and rusty yet imposingly sturdy.

We walk into the prison with the organizer of the prison baseball program, who gives us an informal tour. He points out the new hospital and the building where inmates get sent for “correction.” (shudder) Towards the top of one of the buildings is kind of a caged balcony area — death row. We walk around the perimeter of the prison over to the baseball field, which is right in middle of the exercise yard. Already, the inmate team is warming up, most of them are dressed in blue jeans with denim shirts.

One of the big rules of San Quentin was that non-inmates are not allowed to wear blue shirts or blue pants, to avoid us getting mistaken for an inmate. Yah.. fine by me. That said, aside from guards at the gate, and a guard visible in one of the towers, I didn’t feel an overwhelming guard presence at all. If it were not for the 40 foot high walls surrounding the yard, this baseball field didn’t seem that different than other ones that I’ve played at.

About 20 minutes after we started warming up, someone arrived with the jerseys for the inmate team. Immediately they all began changing into their black and yellow uniforms — no need for locker rooms here. Even the urinals were out in the open — they were these grey plastic structures standing off to the side of the dugout. The exercise yard started filling in with more inmates, some walking or jogging around the yard, some just hanging out near the corners. A group of them gathered at the scoreboard in center field, a classic, hand-operated deal that the inmates themselves constructed in the prison workshop. Cool. 4 umpires came on the field, all inmates. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with 4 umpires and a fully operated scoreboard. Cool.

The inmates were all very courteous and friendly — most of them are lifers and from the ones that I chatted with, the average amount that they’ve been inside was about 15-20 years.. There was one guy that was exactly my age, and he had been in prison since he was 18. The heckling from the inmates during the game was chiding and friendly, all part of the game.

The game itself was pretty solid — their pitcher pitched well, and we played a clean game. At one point, a siren went off and immediately all of the inmates sat down on the ground. I was coaching third base at the time (near the inmate dugout), so looking around at all of the seated inmates, I sat down too.

Seeing me sit down, one of the inmates shouts out “Hey! You ain’t gotta sit down, you’re wearing red!” To which another retorts, “He just don’t wanna get shot!”

Yah. Not getting shot would be great.

We won the game 7-4.

It was a great day, something very different than my usual Saturday. If you want to learn more about baseball at San Quentin, there’s a documentary about it called Bad Boys of Summer.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 2:53 pm and is filed under baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.