If Alcatraz was the Bermuda Triangle of prisons, with its fab five “missing” or “presumed drowned” escapees, than San Quentin is a Red Light District with entertainment venues that include Johnny Cash, B.B. King, Metallica, and baseball, baseball, and more baseball for 90 years.

San Quentin is California’s oldest prison and the only one with a death row; first by gas chamber and then beginning in 1996; lethal injection. It’s like any other prison with long echoing hallways, a yard to strut one’s stuff, prison guards, a watch tower, warden, barbed wire fence,and a feeling of no way out. But there’s one big difference. There’s baseball.

Games have been played there since the 1920’s and it’s currently America’s only prison offering the organized ritual to free one’s mind. There’s uniforms, statistics, and won loss records.

In the 1950’s pro scouts brought prospects into the prison to take some swings against former major league pitcher Blackie Schwamb; incarcerated for killing a doctor in 1948. I don’t know why since the San Francisco Seals of the PCL League played their home games a few nautical miles south in San Francisco’s Mission district. But all for the better because the baseball jubilee at San Quentin continued.

In the 1990’s, the prison started hosting men’s-league teams from the Bay Area. At first the home team prisoners were called the Pirates with a skull and crossbones flag flying in the yard. In 2000, the team changed its name to the Giants when the San Francisco Giants donated game jerseys and grass for a new field.

San Quentin’s right and center field is surrounded by a high concrete wall with razor wire and a tower housing guards. The infield has no grass. You can see a palm tree from home plate. It’s off in the distance to the left of Marin County’s Mount Tamal Pais

I recently stumbled on a baseball documentary about San Quentin-“Bad Boys of Summer” and started wondering about Franklin Page again. It always seemed more than a coincidence that Frank committed his big crime in September of 1994; the same year major league baseball cancelled its season and the World Series. That was the same year San Quentin opened its doors to outside competitors who came to be known as “The Willing.”

Frank and I worked together at Fox Point Landscaping in Milwaukee; cutting lawns for two summers. On Saturdays, we finished early and played baseball at Henry Aaron Field in Lincoln Park. There were 7 of us and no one figured out Frank at the plate. He hit the ball harder than anyone I’ve ever seen.

And he knew exactly what crime to commit and when to do it; unarmed robbery in mid September. It guaranteed him winter in the clink with a sentence not written until after the last out of the World Series. He knew what he was getting; three meals a day, a roof over his head and 7 months to sleep away the baseball strike.

Frank saved a little money from those summer landscaping gigs and unemployment checks collected while in prison. He took off for California in the spring of 1995. Last we heard he was picking garlic in Gilroy. Probably has no need for prison anymore with California being warm year round. Probably sleeps outside, but then again, San Quentin plays baseball and Franks probably knows this.

I wish Negro League Legend Buck O’Neil were still alive to hear Frank make that unmistakable sound when his bat hit ball.

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