Sixty years ago, a former major league pitcher played baseball for San Quentin. He has been called the greatest prison baseball player that ever lived.
Ralph Richard “Blackie” Schwamb was born in Los Angeles in 1926. In his late teens and early 20s he was considered one of the best pitching prospects of his time. The word was that he threw a baseball as fast as major league strikeout-artist and Hall-of-Famer Bob Feller, who was regarded by most as the hardest thrower of his generation.
After a nearly two-year stint in the Navy during World War II, which he spent mostly in the brig, Schwamb returned to L.A. Unfortunately, he loved alcohol, women, and the nightlife and was also involved in the gangster scene in Los Angeles, collecting debts for the mob in a heavy-handed manner.
A New York Giants scout said Ralph Schwamb was the best pitching prospect he ever saw, but knew he couldn’t sign a hoodlum like him for fear of getting fired.
In 1946, the six-foot, five-inch, 168-pound Schwamb signed with the American League’s St. Louis Browns (which moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles in 1954).
Still 21 years old, he was brought up to the majors in July 1948, despite a bad reputation for alcohol abuse and insubordination, and compiled a 1-1 record and 8.53 ERA in 32 innings. In 1949 he made the Browns squad out of spring training, but an argument over $1,000 put him in disfavor with the club’s general manager, relegating him to pitching in the minor leagues.
Later that year he began to go off the deep end, committing a string of robberies. In October, he and a partner killed a doctor in a robbery-gone-bad, for which he was convicted and sentenced to life for murder, and five-to-life for another robbery, thereby arriving at San Quentin in March 1950 (Number A-13670).
The prison had a baseball team, called the San Quentin All-Stars, which was a member of the San Francisco Recreation Summer Baseball League. He quickly became the star of the team.
During that era semipro teams usually had several major-league prospects, and major-leaguers, staying in shape during the off-season, on their squads, and Bay Area baseball was at its apex.
Schwamb, now known as “Slick,” was so dominant and so effective, major league scouts brought prospects into San Quentin to face him to see how they measured up. Three- to four-thousand inmates and staff routinely gathered on the lower yard to watch him pitch. He was also one of the team’s best hitters.
In 1950, S.Q. won its first league championship, based mostly on his 19-3 record. “Slick” Schwamb pitched for San Quentin through the 1954 season when the team was renamed the Pirates. He got sick of the place because of gangs and pressure from gamblers to throw baseball games, so he requested a transfer to Folsom, pitching there through 1958, and closed out his prison baseball “career” at Tehachapi, paroling in January 1960.
It is believed he compiled a prison record of 131 wins and 35 losses, while amassing 1,565 strikeouts in approximately 1,494 innings with a 1.80 ERA. He also played one-third of his prison games at shortstop and led the league in batting three times.
In July 1960, just six months after paroling, Schwamb attempted suicide. He managed a brief return to professional baseball in 1961 with the Pacific Coast League AAA team in Honolulu, but the game had passed him by.
Blackie went in and out of various low-paying jobs and never shook the desire for alcohol, and continued to land in jail on occasion.
Schwamb died of lung cancer in December 1989 at the age of 63. A few years before he died, Blackie stated, “I was a lousy gangster, but I was a great pitcher.”
Author Eric Stone wrote a marvelous biography of Schwamb, titled, “Wrong Side of the Wall,” from which this story was derived. The book was published by The Lyons Press in 2004.
