Ohio’s penal system was hardly alone in allowing incarcerated people to play organized sports. Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees played an exhibition against the prison team at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility on an off day during the 1929 season. But Ohio was “famous for one of the most comprehensive prison sports programs in the U.S.,” according to a 1941 photo feature in Life magazine.
By the time Life visited, the players had switched from baseball to fast-pitch softball. (Too many hard balls were flying over the wall.) The Life spread included photos of two all-star teams, one white and one “colored.” The prison fielded an integrated team when teams from Ohio and surrounding states visited the prison for games on Saturdays and Sundays. The visiting players’ wives watched from a grandstand caged off from the incarcerated spectators.
New to Columbus, my father was unfamiliar with the lore of the Ohio Pen. “I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “I had never been in a prison. But I walked in the front door surrounded by those huge, rock-like walls.” He met his teammates in an anteroom inside the gate. Before leading them into the prison, the guards told them to leave behind aerosol cans and put their gloves and other equipment in a push cart.
The Ohio Pen was a city within a city, with numbered streets running between multiple buildings. Music from transistor radios let my father know when his party approached the two cell blocks that faced the courtyard. “You could see the inmates,” my father said. “Although you didn’t stare at them, I could just sense you were very near the cells.”
The ballfield, named for O. Henry, sat in the rear of the prison, near the power plant, which emitted what my father remembers as a loud hissing sound. The Hurricanes took the field in uniforms with the team nickname printed across the front of the jerseys. One of my father’s teammates said he recognized the second baseman. “We sent him up on bad check charges,” he said.
My father, a sub, watched most of the game from the visitor dugout. He was impressed by the prison team. “They were good,” he said. “They had obviously played softball for some time.” The umpires, also incarcerated, called a strict game. My father went in in the sixth inning, with his team trailing. He jogged out to right field. Taking his position, he felt close to the men in prison garb sitting along the foul line—“very few steps, there was almost no foul ground,” he said. A little nervous, he kept his eyes focused on home plate.