Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that always hits a home run… as long as no one is in the stands to see it!

I’m your host this week, Aaron, and with me are Steve & Shea!

I’m Steve, and I find myself unable to NOT focus on what’s happening in Ukraine right now, and as a result, I now realize how much I thought I knew that I didn’t and how much more there is to learn. Okay, Aaron and Shea, good luck making funny from that.

I’m Shea, and this week I learned that if you have trouble remembering whether or not you should slam your nuts in the car door or not, just remember that “Genital” sounds like “Gentle”.

Round Table

So round table this week doesn’t have much, but in doing some number crunching this week I can say with some accuracy that thanks to the support of our patrons we were able to donate an amazing $1473.70 to WyoAIDS in 2021! Thanks to all of you for your support and if you’d like to kick on that you’ll hear WyoAIDS info in the mid-show bumper as well as our Patreon pitch!

We also need to say thanks to Dr. Eric who wrote in to let us know that the discussion on Art and Arpad was, apparently, spot on. He’s a professional knower of Anthropological facts with a CV longer than I am tall, so it’s safe to say we got an approving email from a proper expert. Thanks for listening, sorry you have to deal with these idiots on a professional level. He also sent an article from Forensic Magazine he describes as “awful” and yeah… Check the notes for a link https://www.forensicmag.com/583512-Adding-Scat-to-the-Missing-Persons-Identification-Forensic-Toolbox/

Speaking of professional things, let’s talk about sports!

Escape From Wyoming

Today I’m going to talk about America’s pastime… no, not exporting violence and ignorance — its old-timey, traditional, pastime. The Great American Pastime as it were. Deathball!

Err, no, sorry…

Better Baseball!

I’ve always contended baseball, and other stand-around sports like cricket, golf, and — while decidedly less standy-aroundy — soccer, would be dramatically improved by the random placement of land mines.

I don’t remember who made that joke originally, but indeed, nothing adds that little touch of Jeux devives like arbitrarily placed explosives.

Or at least, that was my hope. In reality, making people play sports for their lives a la Snake Plissken in Escape from New York is just kinda sad and reprehensible.

Still, against that backdrop of … some kind of sportsmanship anyway, we need to talk about Wyoming’s favorite baseball team, the Death Row All-Stars.

Basically, if you win, the government won’t kill you that week.

We’ve talked briefly before about Laramie having the territorial prison. Butch Cassidy and other famous outlaws lived there and, if you own a handmade broom, it’s almost certainly from Laramie Wyoming… or China. Our little prison became the hub of yee-oldie broom manufacturing after they set out to make some money off those lazy, good-for-nothing, inmates. I have one for sweeping my shop counter, it’s nice.

These days the profits go to keeping up the prison as a historical site so I feel a little better about that twelve bucks, but ya know.

Wyoming also has another relatively famous prison, though for decidedly less quaint reasons.

The Wyoming State Penitentiary is in Rawlins, a terrible little town nestled between the foothills of sadness and a vast expanse of loneliness.

I’ve been there — to Rawlins, not prison — and can confirm that the entire place smells like stale regret soup. It’s a dirty town full of stabby people. Unless you’re a local-ish listener from Rawlins, then you’re cool. Some of my best friends are from Rawlins.

We’re friends because they escaped.

And if you’ve ever visited Rawlins, you know escape is on everyone’s mind — literally and figuratively. I’m pretty sure U-Haul is the most lucrative business in town, though there are a lot of drug dealers if you can’t physically escape. Still, there are plenty of people stuck there trying to escape their terrible fates, just like the 12 people on the Prison’s 1911 baseball team.

The deal was a simple one. If you win, you live. And escaping the hangman, literally, was a fantastic motivator. Back in the pre-appeal days, it took a month-ish to get you from sentencing to hanging, so the prospect of earning a pass for a week was popular among prisoners.

So, the year is 1901 and the prison has just been opened. Over the next decade, it would collect prisoners of all stripes and Felix Alston, who would become the Warden. Felix was a forward thinker with a massive blind spot for his bad ideas.

The original Warden, Jerky McJerkface was a jerk who seemed to delight in tormenting prisoners. Felix had plans to run a more compassionate prison.

A fan of baseball Felix thought it would make a good break for the prisoners, many of whom had spent nearly 23 hours a day in confinement and most of whom hadn’t been outside since the prison opened 10 years prior. He saw baseball as good exercise and a way to give the men something to do other than agonizingly waiting for death’s sweet embrace.

Some of the men had, at least in Felix’s eyes, a real knack for the game. So much so that he partitioned his friend and then Governor of Wyoming, Joseph Carey, to allow him to field a team in local games.

Now, normally requests like “can I let 12 prisoners out of jail and give them baseball bats?” are the kind of thing that gets shut down whole cloth, but Joseph had a gambling problem and immediately recognized an opportunity to lose all his money. He permitted the team to be formed and immediately set out to place and take bets.

Another local team, the best around according to contemporary remarks, the Wyoming Supply Company Juniors, agreed to play the convicts in their first game.

The team consisted of 12 death row inmates.

Now, I’d love to read you the roster, but the history doesn’t want you to remember them. DeathPenaltyInfo.org doesn’t think state-sanctioned murders pre-1976 are worth counting. WyoArchives.wyo.gov just doesn’t list the people Wyoming has killed, I guess it would be a downer or something eh. The Albany County Library historical archives start in… 1912, literally the year after the information I needed — also the link to the actual document is broken because the pony express forgot to deliver it. I did find some interesting metadata from those docs that supports the state’s portions of the rest of the story, so I guess there’s that.

If you’re chomping at the bit — hehe, cowboy joke — for the info that I couldn’t find, I can’t promise it’s in Death Row All-Stars: A Story of Baseball, Corruption, and Murder by Chris Enss, but there’s a much better chance that the research department of a New York Times Best Selling author is better than my Google-foo.

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When the team took the field in their disheveled prison uniforms — complete with chains, they did so to a lackluster crowd in the stands and armed guards ready to shoot anyone who looked like they might make a run for it.

The team consisted of three rapists, a forger, five thieves, and three killers.

First up to the mound (that’s where they throw the ball from right Shea?) was Pitcher and rapist Thomas Cameran. He was dying up there in more ways than one. From the aforementioned author Chris Enss: “Individual errors that cost the team the win, would result in death.”

Rawlins was, “at the time” I guess I should add, particularly willing to dispense their kind of justice. Again from Enss:

“Desperadoes caught in the act of robbery, rape, or murder in the town were not only hanged but sometimes actually skinned. Various items were made from the hides of these unfortunate lawbreakers, sold as souvenirs, and used as a warning to other would-be felons.”

So unless you want the next pitcher’s mitt to be made out of your mug, you best throw the ball extra goodly. Luckily for Camera, a convicted rapist, he threw the ball goodly.

The prisoners bested the local team by 11-1!

The victory was thanks largely to the team’s star player, right fielder, and murderer, Joseph Sneg. If you look at your phones you can see a yee-oldie prison baseball player doing his best Seinfeld impression.

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In that first game, Sneg hit two home runs, one of them a grand slam. While the stands weren’t packed for this first game the various interested parties, including the Governor, had gone to some trouble informing the press of the event. Following their rousing victory, Sneg was pictured in papers across the country, notably, the Washington Post ran the headline “Slayer Scores Home Runs.”

The local paper, The Carbon County Journal, said the team, who they referred to as “The Cons” played a classy game:

“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.”

Team captain George Saban, a murder, who, thanks to local sympathies and celebrity, was allowed to leav