The Wyoming State Penitentiary All-Stars: The Death Row Baseball Team That Never Lost

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1911 team photo of the Wyoming State Penitentiary All-Stars in prison uniforms with the warden's young son, beneath the article title

In the summer of 1911, the best baseball team in Rawlins, Wyoming wasn't made up of shopkeepers or railwaymen. It was made up of murderers, rapists, forgers and thieves, all wearing prison numbers on their shirts and all playing inside the walls of the state penitentiary.

They played four games, won every one of them by a mile and then vanished from the record books. Their star hitter was a man waiting to be hanged. Their captain was a killer who'd later walk away from a work gang and never be seen again. And the whole thing was cooked up by a warden who, depending on who you believe, had money riding on every pitch.

Quick Answers

What were the Wyoming State Penitentiary All-Stars? A baseball team made up of inmates at the state prison in Rawlins, Wyoming, formed in 1911.
Who set it up? Warden Felix Alston, a former Big Horn County sheriff and keen baseball fan.
How did they do? They played four games against a local side in July and August 1911 and won all four.
Who was the star? Joseph Seng, a right fielder on death row for murder. He was hanged on 24 May 1912.

A New Warden and an Old Prison

The Wyoming State Penitentiary had a grim reputation even by the standards of the day. Before 1911, inmates there were hired out to make brooms for a private contractor, Otto Gramm, who also happened to be a millionaire and a former warden. It was the sort of arrangement that turned prisoners into cheap labour, much like the convict leasing system that spread across America after the Civil War. One inmate, Harry Pendergraft, described the set-up as something straight out of the dark ages.

In 1911 Governor Joseph Carey scrapped the broom contract and brought in a new man to run the place. Felix Alston had been sheriff of Big Horn County and would stay on as warden until 1919. He was also baseball mad. With hundreds of idle men on his hands and nothing to fill their days, he decided a team might lift morale. By May 1911 he'd put one together, and some called it Alston's All Stars.

1918 photo of prisoners playing baseball inside the high walls of a United States Penitentiary, with a guard tower behind the field

Meet the Team

Alston didn't pick his players for their characters. The roster read like a charge sheet:

Joseph Seng, right field: first-degree murder, under sentence of death
Thomas Cameron, ace pitcher: sexual assault
Joe Guzzardo, shortstop: manslaughter
Eugene Rowan, first base: rape
John Crottie, third base: grand larceny
Frank Fitzgerald, second base: breaking and entering
Sidney Potter, centre field: forgery
George Saban, captain and coach: serving time for his part in the killing of three sheepmen

There's a detail in all this that usually gets skipped. Rowan and the team's catcher, James Powell, were both Black. In 1911 neither man would've been allowed anywhere near a major or minor league diamond, yet here they were on the same side as white inmates. The team's mascot was the warden's own young son, Felix Vern Alston Jr. The first team photo shows the men with their prison numbers stitched on their shirt pockets, though later pictures show them in proper matching kit.

Saban didn't actually play. He was missing two fingers on each hand, so he ran things from the sidelines instead, and by most accounts Alston gave him an awful lot of freedom both on the field and off it.

George Saban: The Captain With a Past

Saban was no petty crook. On the night of 2 April 1909 he was one of the masked cattlemen who attacked a sheep camp at Spring Creek, near Ten Sleep in the Big Horn Basin. The raiders fired into a sheep wagon and set it alight, killing three men along with dozens of sheep and the herders' dogs. It was the last big bloodletting of Wyoming's range wars between cattle and sheep ranchers.

Five men in suits and hats charged over the 1909 Spring Creek Raid, including George Saban, posing outside a brick building — Defendants in the Spring Creek Raid case. Clockwise from top left: Herb Brink, Ed Eaton, George Saban, Tom Dixon, Milton Alexander.

It wasn't his first brush with violence either. Saban had led a 1903 raid on the Big Horn County lock-up that left two prisoners and a deputy dead, but that case fell apart when witnesses were frightened off. After Spring Creek he pleaded guilty and got at least 20 years of hard labour. He wouldn't serve anything like that.

Joseph Seng: The Slugger on Death Row

The team's real draw was Joseph Seng. Originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania, he'd moved to Evanston, Wyoming in 1908 and worked as a night watchman for the Union Pacific Railroad. On 4 August 1910 he shot a railroad detective called William Lloyd, who died around half an hour later.

Front and side prison mugshots of Joseph Seng with inmate number 1612 — Joseph Seng

Seng handed himself in and claimed Lloyd had gone for his gun first. "I beat him to it," he reportedly said. Witnesses backed his story and contradicted it in roughly equal measure. Some later retellings claim Seng was having an affair with Lloyd's wife, Alta, but that detail comes from author Chris Enss and nobody's ever properly corroborated it.

Whatever happened that night, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to hang. Then he picked up a bat.

Four Games, Four Wins

The All-Stars' opponents were the Rawlins Juniors, a local side. Here's how the season went:

18 July 1911: All-Stars 11, Juniors 1. Seng hit two home runs, one of them clearing the bases and sailing over the prison wall.
5 August: All-Stars 11, Juniors 1. Seng went four for four.
13 August: All-Stars 11, Juniors 4. Cameron struck out 14 batters.
27 August: All-Stars 15, Juniors 10. This one was played in public at Overland Park in Rawlins, the only game outside the walls.

The timing of that first game is remarkable. On the very same day Seng was hitting home runs, the Wyoming Supreme Court granted him a stay of execution. Newspapers loved it. The Washington Post ran a headline about the slayer who hit homers, and the local Carbon County Journal reported that the Juniors seemed rattled playing on unfamiliar ground. You can hardly blame them.

After the last game at Overland Park, the players handed back their kit and went back to their cells. The All-Stars never played again.

Gambling, Grudges and a Box of Sand

The team didn't exactly bring peace to the prison. Rumours spread that the players were getting special treatment, and gambling followed the games wherever they went. A review of the Death Row All Stars book in Wild West magazine notes the claim that Alston handed Saban money to bet on the games in Rawlins saloons, and that Saban was hardly the only one placing wagers.

Not every inmate was a fan. One prisoner, Lorenzo Paseo, who apparently couldn't stand baseball, threatened to kill both the warden and Seng. In another incident someone shoved a heavy box of sand off a walkway towards Seng and only narrowly missed him, though Alston insisted the real target had been him.

The 1911 Wyoming State Prison baseball team in matching WSP uniforms, with bats, gloves and the warden's son as mascot

That summer the prison was falling apart in other ways too. Two men walked off a work detail on 9 August and had to be rounded up, and on 15 August a guard was killed during an escape attempt. By September Governor Carey had written to Alston about his concerns, and former warden Otto Gramm and US Senator Francis E. Warren were both taking aim at the baseball club. Alston disbanded the team that month and replaced it with an education scheme for the whole prison.

Did They Really Play for Their Lives?

This is where the story gets wildly embellished. The best-known version of the All-Stars comes from the 2014 book by Howard Kazanjian and Chris Enss, which claims wins earned the men time off their sentences while costly mistakes could get a player killed. That claim was picked up and repeated everywhere, from a New York Post feature reposted by SABR to local Wyoming radio.

There's no solid evidence for any of it. The Cowboy State Daily's deep dive into the team points out that the Enss books contain significant errors, and even the friendly Wild West review hedges the execution claim with an "if true". What can be said is that many prisoners believed Seng's form at the plate was the only thing keeping him off the gallows. Whether that was ever really the case is another matter, because once the games stopped, so did his luck.

The Hanging of Joseph Seng

Seng's mother, a priest and even the prison doctor petitioned Governor Carey to spare him. Carey refused. On 24 May 1912, Joseph Seng became the first man executed at the Wyoming State Penitentiary, hanged on the Julian Gallows. He wouldn't be the last. Fourteen men were executed there before the gallows gave way to a gas chamber in 1936, the same method that would later be at the centre of the Jimmy Lee Gray case decades afterwards.

Rawlins already had a dark relationship with the rope. Thirty years earlier a lynch mob in the same town had dragged out the outlaw Big Nose George Parrott, whose remains ended up somewhere far stranger than a grave. Seng at least got a headstone, which still stands at the old prison.

Wyoming State Penitentiary baseball players in 1911 wearing prison shirts with inmate numbers, seated around a young boy with bats and a catcher's mask

Saban Walks Away

And George Saban? The captain who'd been given so much latitude simply left. In 1913 he slipped away from a prison work crew near Manderson and was never seen again. Some said he'd made it to South America. One version of the story claims a guard who'd done very nicely out of betting on the team helped him get out, though that's never been proven either.

The penitentiary itself carried on until 1981. Today the old building is known as the Wyoming Frontier Prison, and it's open to visitors, gallows history, gas chamber and all. Of everyone connected with the 1911 season, the man who killed three sheepmen got clean away, while the slugger who swore he'd fired in self-defence ended up on the end of a rope.