38. Alston’s All Stars
Warden Felix Alston put together a pretty decent team – decent, that is, in how they performed as players, not in how they were as people. They were, after all in prison or even on death row. It featured some of the hardest of hardened criminals, and included three murderers, three rapists, five thieves, and a forger. The team’s pitcher, Thomas Cameron, was a convicted rapist. The team’s captain, George Saban, was a convicted murderer who had ambushed three sleeping sheep herders, and shot each one in the face, at close range.
Incredibly, Saban got away with a lenient 20-year sentence. It helped that he was best friends with the arresting officer that day: then-Sheriff Felix Alston, who eventually became the prison warden who founded the death row All Stars. Indeed, when Alston became warden, he gave his buddy Saban special permission to come and go from the prison as he pleased. Saban also benefited from local sympathy, as many saw his depredations as just another salvo in an ongoing turf war between cattle and sheep herders.