In “The Best Baseball Team Behind Bars” the New York Times features the San Quentin Giants, considered the best prison baseball team in the country. San Quentin’s baseball team has been a prison yard institution for 123 seasons, and the Giants are indeed a good baseball team, with their best season in 2019 where they finished 38-2. In 2024, they compiled a record of 20-9-3. They are considered competitive in regular play, with one person describing their caliber as similar to an independent ball team.
Anthony Denard, an Oakland native, grew up playing T-ball. His dream was to play in the Major Leagues, and he got pretty close. Straight out of high school, Denard was drafted by the Minnesota Twins in 1996. “I picked up the phone, found out it was Darren Johnson with the Minnesota Twins,” Denard said. “He told me I’d been drafted over there by them. It’s an exciting feeling. It’s something that I had worked hard for, but I ended up coming to prison.”
Denard was sentenced to 19 years to life in prison for second-degree murder. He has served 25 years of his sentence.
Excerpts from the New York Times feature appear below.
Richard Williams couldn’t have been more excited. He had been incarcerated in San Quentin for over three decades, and for the next six months, he would not be just Richard Williams, inmate H-07618. He would be Coach Will, the leader of the San Quentin Giants, the country’s best baseball team behind bars.
When Saturday morning (tryouts) came, dozens of men gathered on the edge of the infield dirt, still in their prison blue work clothes. They were as young as 24 and as old as 60; some had played college baseball, while others were picking up a bat for the first time since Little League. They would open their season on the day before Easter, and Williams began the tryout with his own message of redemption.
“We are here to prove to the outside world that we can play hard, and work together, and be teammates,” Williams said. “We are here to show them that people can change.”
Baseball has been played inside San Quentin for decades, usually between three teams called the Giants, the A’s and the Pirates, divided along racial lines. But in 2015, Williams and the players pushed to combine the teams into one. Instead of playing games mostly against each other, they wanted to focus on playing teams from the outside. As part of the broader transformation of the prison, which officially rebranded into a “rehabilitation center” in 2023, their request was granted.
The players believe that while baseball may play an important role in their rehabilitation, the team is not always an inspiration to the state officials who determine their parole. Parole boards, players say, would rather see them sit in a classroom and earn a certification — something that might better set them up for gainful employment upon re-entry in society. (The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation declined to comment.)
Lawyers who have represented the baseball players at their hearings say the team has come to epitomize a larger tension in the criminal justice system: While attitudes toward rehabilitation have evolved, the lawyers said, parole boards are often less progressive.
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