Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing #52 : A Shawshank Moment in Mets History at Sing Sing

Welcome back to Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing, our weekly rummage through the Mets’ attic, where we brush the dust off the bubble gum cards, flip through the curling pages of old yearbooks, and rediscover the players who once made you pause mid potato knish and mutter, “Hold on… he was a Met, right?”

Last week, we told the story of Jim Beauchamp, a baseball lifer whose time in Flushing was brief, bruising, and ultimately redemptive, a reminder that baseball careers, much like real lives, don’t always move in straight lines. Which makes this week’s installment a fitting way to close out the year, because this story is also about redemption, only this time it has less to do with stats and more to do with iron bars, locked gates, and baseball finding its way into places where hope doesn’t always travel easily.

This is also something of a Sunday School first. Over the past 51 installments, we’ve profiled forgotten players, beloved bit parts, mascots, organists, announcers, themed stadium areas, and just about every other corner of Mets history that could reasonably fit into a shoebox. What we’ve never featured before is a visit. Until now. And the fact that this one took place in May of 1967 somehow makes it feel even more Mets.

The genesis of this column came the old-fashioned way. I was flipping through an old Mets Yearbook, doing absolutely nothing productive, when I came across a photograph I had somehow never noticed before. The image stopped me cold. There stood Ralph Kiner, Ron Swoboda, Yogi Berra, and a very young Tom Seaver, not at Shea Stadium or a charity banquet, but inside Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. It was the kind of photo that makes you blink, lean closer, and say, “Wait… what?”

Sing Sing has been part of American history since 1826, perched along the Hudson River and etched into our national vocabulary as shorthand for consequences. What’s less widely known is that the prison also has a deep and genuine connection to baseball. Inmates played organized games, hosted visiting teams, and treated the sport as something steady and familiar in a place that offered very little of either. Photos of Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg hung in the gym, silent reminders that baseball, like time, keeps moving even when you don’t.

Sing Sing’s baseball pedigree did not begin with the Mets, and it did not wait until the expansion era to announce itself. Nearly four decades earlier, in September of 1929, the prison hosted a visitor whose presence alone could rearrange the mood of an entire institution. Babe Ruth came up the Hudson that day, and according to the Brooklyn Eagle, for two hours he gave what was described as “the saddest crowd of boys in the world” something they hadn’t felt in a long time: uncomplicated joy. Three baseballs escaped Sing Sing during the game, last seen disappearing over the high brick wall in right field, fugitives aided and abetted by Ruth’s bat. No search party was formed.

The scene itself sounded almost cinematic. The day began gray and gloomy, the cellhouse looming over the river as it always had, until just before the game the sun came out, as if even the weather understood the assignment. Word spread quickly. “The Babe’s coming!” echoed through the prison, and faces pressed against cold steel bars as inmates craned for their first glimpse of the man in linen knickers who was already larger than the game he played. Ruth waved, grinned his familiar crooked grin, and made a point of grinning back at everyone who grinned at him. These were bad boys, the paper noted, but boys after all, and Ruth had always gotten along famously with boys.

Once the game began, Ruth wasted no time turning Sing Sing into his personal stage. Facing convict pitching for the first time in his career, he responded by doubling and then hitting three home runs in his first four trips to the plate, including blasts that cleared parts of the prison no one else ever had. One sailed over the right-field wall where Bill Terry had once homered. Another went over the center-field wall, something the paper noted had never been done before or since. Each swing brought roars from the stands, pleas from inmates begging their pitcher to “keep it down,” and laughter that echoed off the brick walls that spoiled so many of their games.

Ruth did more than hit. He clowned around first base, kidded the guards, autographed dozens of baseballs, and even took the mound late in the game, chatting with hitters as he pitched. “Can you hit a hook?” he asked one batter, before answering for him moments later. He waved his arms theatrically after each home run, prompting the inmates to wave back, an old act for Ruth, but one that felt brand new inside those walls. For a little while, the Mutual Welfare League score didn’t matter. The score of the day was something else entirely.

Amid all the noise and laughter, the humor flowed both ways. One inmate, emboldened by the moment and clearly enjoying the rare luxury of heckling from behind bars, shouted out to Ruth that the only thing worse than the prison team was the food they had to eat. The Babe loved it. He laughed, played along, and treated the crack not as an insult but as part of the show, another reminder that for those two hours the distance between legend and inmate, star and spectator, had shrunk to the length of a punchline. Baseball, once again, had done what it always does best: leveled the room.

When it was over and Ruth prepared to leave, the Eagle wrote that he left Sing Sing happier than he found it. For two precious hours, the men inside forgot where they were. Everybody was a kid again in the best of all possible worlds, which is about as perfect a description of baseball’s highest calling as has ever been written. Long before the Mets arrived in 1967 with Seaver and Yogi and Kiner, Sing Sing had already learned that lesson from the Babe himself: that sometimes a baseball game doesn’t just pass the time, it lifts it.

When the Mets arrived in May of 1967, they brought with them an unmistakably Metsian mix of personalities. Ralph Kiner was there in his role as broadcaster, Hall of Fame slugger, and occasional source of unintentional comedy. Yogi Berra came along as a coach, philosopher, and walking fortune cookie. Ron Swoboda represented the everyman Mets fan favorite, and Tom Seaver, all of 22 years old, was already becoming something larger than life.

According to contemporary newspaper accounts, the visit was a success almost from the moment it began. About 800 inmates gathered to watch a tightly edited 27-minute Mets highlight film, a phrase that in 1967 required a great deal of creative restraint. There was laughter, applause, and genuine engagement. Then came one of the day’s more memorable moments, when Kiner introduced Seaver and confidently announced that the rookie had won three games and lost two. From the crowd came an immediate correction. Seaver had only lost one game. Few things in Mets history are more on-brand than having your announcer corrected by inmates who were clearly keeping better track of the standings.

The day wasn’t all jokes and highlight reels. The players were taken on a somber tour of the prison, including the death house and the electric chair, and the mood shifted noticeably. Yogi later remarked that teenagers beginning to get into trouble might straighten out if they could see a place like this. Coming from Berra, it was as close to solemn as he ever got.

Dick Young’s account of the visit added even more color, particularly when Sing Sing’s athletic director proudly explained that the prison team played roughly 50 games a year and then deadpanned that they had never lost a game on the road. Yogi paused, processed the statement, and eventually learned it was a joke, making Sing Sing one of the few places that ever managed to successfully confuse Yogi Berra on his own turf.

As the session wound down and the Mets prepared to leave, one inmate shook Yogi’s hand and said, “I’ll see you in 40.” Without missing a beat, Yogi replied, “Don’t forget.” It was a moment that somehow managed to be funny, human, and heartbreaking all at once, which pretty much sums up baseball when it’s at its best.

At first glance, this might seem like an odd entry in the Forgotten Faces of Flushing series. There’s no stat line, no box score, and no baseball card tucked into a shoebox somewhere. But it belongs here. Because this isn’t just a story about the Mets. It’s a story about baseball as connection, about showing up, and about redemption that doesn’t come with a standing ovation.

Last week, Jim Beauchamp reminded us that careers can bend without breaking. This week, a forgotten Mets visit reminds us that the game can still open a door, even in places where all the others are locked. So as we close out our 52nd installment and wrap up another year of Sunday School, it feels right to end not with a pennant or a parade, but with a photograph, a moment, and a reminder that baseball has always had a way of reaching the unreachable.

And somewhere in Sing Sing that day, you just know someone walked back to his cell thinking, at least in here, nobody blows a save in the ninth.

Class dismissed—for the year.