San Quentin’s Giants
At one of California’s most notorious prisons, baseball teams take the field.
Video by Clayton Worfolk on Publish Date October 24, 2014.This September, as the San Francisco Giants were lumbering toward their eventual World Series date with the Kansas City Royals, another team of Giants took the field for the final game of their regular season. They wore hand-me-down jerseys and swung bats pulled from an equipment closet under lock and key. As a trumpeter sounded the opening notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the team circled the pitcher’s mound with their green-and-yellow-clad counterparts from the A’s. The last game of the San Quentin State Prison baseball season was underway.
In this short film for Op-Docs, we show how the inmates have embraced this quintessential American sport, and see how they peacefully interact with one another on the diamond, despite their different backgrounds and the often tense dynamics within the prison walls.
My colleagues at Heist (a San Francisco-based production company) and I had first heard about this prison baseball league a year earlier. From the beginning, we were interested in making an experiential documentary focused on the sport of baseball more than the specifics of the program itself. San Quentin, despite its grisly reputation (earned partly as a result of housing California’s Death Row), has dozens of programs for inmates, from drama groups to a newspaper to video production classes. Inmates have played baseball here since the 1920s. Visiting teams from adult leagues around California come to the prison to play the Giants and A’s, but in between those games, the two teams square off against each other.
After the final game, the Giants and the A’s gathered back on the mound to shake hands. Program organizers and volunteer coaches congratulated the inmates on a great season. Tryouts for next year’s teams begin in the spring.