Ball Four, Take Your Base!

Baseball at San Quentin: the 2011 & 2012 Seasons

Kent A Philpott, Katie LC Philpott

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English

Earthen Vessel Publishing
24 October 2025

Sports training & coaching; Baseball

What do you do when death threats circulate against you in a prison, and the inmate baseball teams you coach as a volunteer push ordinary competition into the danger zone? Strike Three, You're Out! described Kent Philpott's experiences coaching baseball at San Quentin Prison during the 2010 season during rising turmoil among the team inmates. Ball Four, Take Your Base! continues the story into 2011 and 2012 of how a perfectly wonderful game can be both a joy and ruined by friendly and unfriendly competition and undercover activities. Stories from other visiting teams and photos from several seasons are included.

Philpott's previous book, Strike Three, You're Out! took the reader through the making of a baseball team and the 2010 season inside San Quentin, one of the most infamous state prisons in the country. See further inside the thinking, emotions, and stresses that accompany the inmates' involvement in what is often the most important part of their entire incarceration. Understand why inmates will say and do almost anything to get a chance to play ball and how frustration and disappointment derails them. Find out what ""payback"" is, how power and authority work, why the sports teams are the only integrated groups, and how ""reverse racism"" plays a role. The payback part is foremost in Ball Four, Take Your Base! expressed through multiple death threats and manipulations and ending with Philpott being banned from the prison.

By: Kent A Philpott
Designed by: Katie LC Philpott
Imprint: Earthen Vessel Publishing
Dimensions: Height: 254mm, Width: 178mm, Spine: 9mm
Weight: 308g
ISBN: 9780996859097
ISBN 10: 0996859098
Pages: 126
Publication Date: 24 October 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Reviews for Ball Four, Take Your Base!: Baseball at San Quentin: the 2011 & 2012 Seasons

""To expose the public to the humanity of people in prison is a wonderful thing, and Kent Philpott not only spent many years in San Quentin helping to allow inmates to get through the day, but he was helping to expose the humanity of people in prison to the outside public. Three Strikes, You're Out! and Ball Four, Take Your Base! will educate many people outside about the realities and virtues of people inside to the ultimate benefit of both."" - Elliot Smith, Lawyer and Coach at San Quentin Prison ""Kent Philpott is the Baptist street minister who devoted his extra service hours not only to developing the raw-talented but highly enthusiastic inmates at San Quentin State Prison into semi-pro level baseball players, but also simultaneously taught the general rules and laws of life, good behavior, and the meaning of acceptance of God's presence into one's life, though not in a blatantly religious manner. Warden after warden, officer after officer, inmate after inmate who came to observe Kent at work with many unfortunate, sad, often trembling men, were equally amazed how he taught, inspired, and often pleaded the more troubled into how to play a major love in his life-baseball. This book tells that story."" - Don DeNevi, former Director of Education, San Quentin Prison