The Veeck family is at it again.
Before the Frontier League’s 2026 season kicks off, the Joliet Slammers are going to play an exhibition at their namesake slammer — the Old Joliet Prison. The team has announced “The Big House Ballgame” will take place on April 30, giving fans a chance to see baseball in a correctional facility where it was played by inmates for 88 years.
But playing in a prison yard? That’ll be a new one.
“The Big House Ballgame is exactly the kind of big idea event that gets us fired up as a team,” Night Train Veeck said in a press release. “We love being a part of these special moments that bring people together, surprise them a little, and give them a memory they’ll be talking about for a long time.”
The event is scheduled as the official kickoff for the centennial celebration of Route 66, the historic highway from Chicago to Los Angeles, and the venue is era-appropriate for bringing the early and middle of the 20th century to life. According to the Slammers, baseball was introduced to the Old Joliet Prison in 1914 by a warden who sought to improve morale and encourage good behavior, and inmates continued to play baseball there until the prison closed in 2002.
The Joliet Slammers have been members of the Frontier League — an MLB Partner League — since 2011, and before that Joliet had a team in the independent Northern League. The city first had pro baseball in the 1890s, with an entry in the Illinois-Indiana League.
The prison was immortalized in cinema with 1980’s “Blues Brothers” — John Belushi’s “Joliet” Jake Blues is paroled out of the big house at the beginning of the movie. But it was famous — or infamous — long before that, having housed notorious criminals such as Leopold and Loeb, Baby Face Nelson, Sam Giancana and John Wayne Gacy.
The Slammers’ Big House Ballgame will be the marquee event of a “full slate of programs and community-wide activities throughout the city,” the team’s press release said. There’s a page on their website where fans can sign up for the chance to be eligible for tickets to The Big House Ballgame.
