The Last Opening Day of the Season

Wait just a minute.

We turns out we aren't through with Opening Day baseball games yet.

Saturday is Opening Day for the San Quentin Giants baseball team.  Yes, they are prisoners and they play baseball.

Hitters will be encouraged to steal bases and pitchers will try to pick them off one by one. It's all part of the game.
     
Saturday's game is the first of 26 games scheduled against teams from the outside.
     
San Quentin State Prison's public information officer Lt. Samuel Robinson says the team is still looking for other opponents to fill out the schedule.
     
"We're always the home team. We have a perfect road record,"  Robinson laughed.
     
The prison has had a baseball team during the first half of the 20th Century, in the 1950s and again starting in 1995. Many of the members of the SQ Giants are serving life terms.
     
The team was the San Quentin Pirates until 2000 when they adopted the name of their professional counterparts across the Bay.
     
Mike Murphy, the longtime San Francisco Giants' equipment manager, gave the San Quentin team the San Francisco Giants' practice uniforms.
     
The game is an outlet that allows inmates of different races, who normally segregate themselves in prison, to interact and develop camaraderie.
     
"This is a multi-cultural, eclectic group of individuals working  together for a common cause," Robinson said.
     
The games also help foster an inmate's rehabilitation.
     
"It shows the inmates that people from outside the facility are  still interested in their welfare, do not demonize them and are willing to  interact with them," Robinson said.
     
And for a few hours on Saturday morning and Wednesday and Monday evenings it's not prison. It's baseball.

Bay City News contributed to this report.

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