Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League
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Pel was a large stadium. Some players thought its horseshoe shape resembled the Polo Grounds in New York where the Brooklyn Dodgers played. The field had short foul lines, huge power alleys in right and left center, and a deep area behind home plate. It was a space so vast that a fast runner like Toni could advance from first to third on a wild pitch.16 Toni thought it strange that a 260-foot fly ball would be a “Chinese home run”—a foul ball into the stands—and a four-hundred-foot wallop to one of the deep alleys was an easy out.17 Pel was built for a new brand of sluggers—players who didn’t depend on bulk and power but who were trim and fast and had strong wrists.18 A hitter didn’t need strength for Pel as much as precision. Just ask Sam Lacy about using finesse—every kind of finesse—in that ballpark. Lacy, a black sportswriter for the Baltimore Afro-American, once staged a protest at Pel when some white writers wouldn’t let him in the press box to cover Jackie Robinson. Undeterred by the discrimination, Lacy took a chair and went up to the roof. “The next thing I know, several of them [white writers] came up to sit with me. I asked Dick Young, ‘What are you guys doing up here?’* He said, ‘Well, we decided we need some sun, Sam.’”19 Young’s knowing comment was rare: most white people didn’t go out of their way to stand with blacks against Jim Crow. Most ballplayers, sportswriters, and fans gathering in the park obeyed Jim Crow restrictions. Negroes headed to black seating in the bleachers under the big Jax beer sign; whites filed into the box seats and grandstands along the third base line. Toni no longer was surprised to see whites at a black baseball game; sometimes as many as five hundred would show up on a Sunday. She never could be sure, however, if whites came to support black teams or make catcalls. “Left-handed compliments,” players called some of the remarks heard from the whites only stands. Take the fan in Shreveport who yelled that his city’s white team needed a few “niggers so we can win some ball games.” Veteran players advised newcomers to ignore the comments, even the offensive taunts of “watermelon,” “dice shooter,” and “cotton picker”—a phrase that always sent Toni reeling. “As long as they don’t touch you or put their hands on you, then you have no recourse.”20 At Pel there were other signs of racism that were more difficult to ignore—signs like the chicken wire in the stands.
In the Pelican Stadium grandstands, chicken wire separated white fans, who sat under a roof, from blacks, who sat in the sun. The same was true in Kansas City for black fans attending Blues games, the city’s white ball club.21 The sight of chicken wire caging the fans was an assault to every black athlete who played in those stadiums. Some players were able to push the infuriating image out of their minds. Others could not. Pitcher Wilmer Fields could never forget the chicken wire at Pel. Later, during the 1953 season, while Fields was on the mound warming up for the Homestead Grays, he scanned the crowd, trying to locate his wife in the stands.* “I looked out there and saw my wife, smiling back at me and waving, penned in with chicken wire, like she and all the other blacks were just farm animals.” Seeing his wife behind the chicken wire made it difficult to summon control. “I got this sick feeling in my stomach, really sick. It was the only time the racism and segregation and all that really got to me. I took the ball and I slammed it into my glove as hard as I could, hurting my hand, and said, ‘Wilmer, just forget about it and pitch. Just pitch.’”22
Swallowing anger on the diamond was a learned response for black players. “You just went about your daily duty whether it was baseball or anything else,” Paul Lewis of the New Orleans Black Pelicans said.† “It was just another thing you had to live with.”23 Players followed an unspoken motto: keep your head down, play well, and ride it out. Jackie Robinson knew he could not challenge an umpire’s call for fear he would be unfairly tagged as a hothead.24 Black players understood that if they lashed out at racist fans, owners would confront the players, not the fans. “I knew I had to keep my composure, never using profanity to respond to critics,” Toni said.25 But bottled-up anger could not be corked forever, as Satchel Paige had warned. Some players who did not explode found ways to use taunts to their advantage. Bill White remembered his difficult postwar summer in Danville, Virginia.* “I was only 18 and immature,” he said. At times he yelled back at prejudiced fans, but then found a more effective target for his anger. He took it out on the ball. “The more fans gave it to me, the harder I hit the ball. They eventually decided to leave me alone.” It was a “victory over bigotry,” White said.26 Finding a way to beat racism was like staring down a knuckleball, one player said. “If a guy’s got a good knuckleball and you know he’s going to throw you knuckleballs, you learn to hit it. You know it’s hard, but you still have to do it because he’s not going to throw you anything else.”27 Hitting the ball was more than a batting average statistic to many black players.
With batting practice over at Pel, BeeBop Gordon of the Sea Lions went through his pregame ritual and tried to count heads. “There were college guys on our team,” he said, who could estimate the number of fans in the stands and quickly do the math to calculate how much money each player would earn from the day’s gate receipts. Sometimes it seemed to BeeBop that dollars were more on the minds of players than playing, but he understood their concern. Many players had families to support and were always debating whether playing baseball paid as much as factory work back home. In a few years, BeeBop would decide the pay and the time on the road were not worth it, and he moved to Detroit for a job at the Ford Motor Company.28 But looking out at the crowd on the 1949 Opening Day in New Orleans, BeeBop was happy. Alan Page had accurately predicted a good turnout. Nearly five thousand fans came through the gates at Pel. The Creoles smashed the Fort Worth Tigers 20–7 in the opener and fought a closely matched contest with the San Francisco Sea Lions until darkness forced the game to be called at 7–7.
The Louisiana Weekly, the city’s black newspaper, had a new editor covering the game. Jim Hall worked as a maintenance man at the newspaper before he started writing sports. He had no sports reporting experience, although he had played basketball at Dillard University.29 Hall wrote, “The highlight of the afternoon was the exhibition put on by San Francisco handless and footless wonder Little Sammie Workman, which was worth the price of admission alone. The little fellow performed feats that were truly amazing and kept the crowd … mystified and almost unbelieving. The applause which followed his act was deafening and fully justified.”30 No doubt Toni was disappointed that Hall did not give more attention to the game. There were no statistics in the article, not even a box score. She received one mention with her nickname, middle, and last name scrambled almost beyond recognition. “Lyle Stone Tony,” Hall wrote, was in the lineup.
Inaccurate, incomplete, or inadequate newspaper coverage was a constant source of frustration for Toni and the other black players. Most black newspapers like the Louisiana Weekly were published once a week, and events that happened four or five days before the paper went to press would not be included in the paper. “Why cover a game Sunday if the paper didn’t publish until the following Thursday?” some editors asked.31 The sports department had one or perhaps two employees who covered multiple baseball venues: from Jackie Robinson and the major leagues to Negro League ball; semi-pro and barnstorming teams, local squads, and public school and college teams; and other summer sports such as tennis, boxing, and track. Some sports editors had to divide their time among additional responsibilities as city editors or entertainment reporters. Rarely did Jim Hall have the resources or the space on the Louisiana Weekly sports page to include an interview with a player or in-depth coverage of a game. Hall never had the luxury of attending an away game. Edward Harris of the Philadelphia Tribune said baseball was the toughest black sport to cover because teams were always traveling. “You’d see [players] occasionally, sit in the bullpen to chat, and the next thing you know, they were off on a bus going somewhere.”32 Most of the time editors relied on club owners to send in their teams’ final scores and highlights. When the scores did come in, they usually were too lat
e for weekly newspapers. Many times an announcement of a game would appear in the Louisiana Weekly and no follow-up could be found. Readers who tried to follow the Creoles or the Sea Lions could not be sure of final scores or if games had even been played. To add to the problem, teams frequently forgot, were too busy driving to the next town, or were too strapped for money to mail, phone, or telegraph scores to area newspapers. For barnstorming teams such as Toni’s Sea Lions, the situation was even worse. Games with other traveling squads or local teams were often scheduled at the last moment. Local reporters may not have even noticed that a team was in town if they missed handbills distributed around barbershops or promoters’ phone calls hastily made from corner phone booths. Some players even swore that scores were printed in local newspapers only when club owners paid editors to print them.33
Even teams in the Negro League often failed to keep the press informed. Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier pleaded with Negro League club owners to stay on top of scores. “They must inform [the public] what is happening, where their teams play, supply the papers with the proper standings and weekly results and keep their version of the game on a level of dignity.”34 While many newspapers relied on the Elias Howe News Bureau for statistics, Howe also depended on receiving statistics from club owners. Occasionally the bureau posted incorrect results. Tom Baird, owner of the Kansas City Monarchs, pointed out that “some owners don’t send ’em in only when their teams wins, some just sends ’em in now and then and a lot of times when we pay a sports writer, they don’t send them in.”35 Baird had little recourse since the league did not have any procedures to ensure scores were collected or a way to penalize teams that did not accurately and promptly assemble data. At least one time, Howe’s final standings for the complete Negro League season were inaccurate.*
Statistics were another problem because box scores and players’ batting averages were sent in even less frequently. Often players’ names were misspelled, abbreviated, or otherwise barely recognizable. Occasionally owners asked a relief pitcher to keep the scorebook, but if a starting pitcher got in trouble and a reliever went in, the scorebook sat on the bench unattended.36 Some players became so frustrated that their individual statistics were not kept that they began keeping their own records, including data on strengths and weaknesses of opposing players.37 The problem was compounded, of course, by a white press that rarely covered black baseball teams. Scanning the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a newspaper to which white residents subscribed, a reader would hardly know that blacks made up a third of the state’s population. They were all but invisible.38 In addition, many small towns were not large enough to support a black newspaper. Lack of press coverage exasperated Toni, who would play a great game and find no written record of it. The flawed record keeping made it difficult to offer a quantitative argument that she played as well as the men, or that black players were as good as whites. Louisiana sportswriter Russell Stockard realized that the accomplishments of many extraordinary black players were simply lost. “I feel a weakness in my heart for every day they didn’t keep stats,” he said.39 The great Negro League center fielder James “Cool Papa” Bell knew firsthand what Stockard meant. “I remember one game I got five hits and stole five bases,” he recalled, “but none of it was written down because they forgot to bring the scorebook to the game that day.”40
While Jim Hall was not an experienced sportswriter, he was resourceful and learned reporting quickly. Soon he began writing on the political significance of sports, using his column in the Louisiana Weekly to lobby on behalf of black athletes. In one column he called on the major leagues to consider squads such as the Sea Lions and Creoles as minor league feeders. A “mixed farm system could materialize in democratic sections of the country. (Remember Truman won the South),” Hall wrote.41 Earlier that month, the Pacific Coast League’s San Francisco Seals added another black player to the league in signing pitcher Percy Fischer. Paul I. Fagan, president of the PCL, was a new and unequivocal voice in support of integration. “Baseball is an American game. Every American should have an opportunity on the basis of his ability alone,” he wrote. “That is our policy and I personally guarantee that this policy will be obeyed. If anybody in my employ does not like this American ideal, he can turn in his contract.”42 Jim Hall chided New Orleans sports promoters—black and white—for being too accepting of the racial divide. “Frankly in New Orleans, the promoters of baseball, basketball, football, along with track, lack the drive to break down the barriers of Jim Crow in sports,” he wrote. “With the exception of boxing (the Louisiana law states there shall be no fistic combat match between any person of the Caucasian ‘white race’ and one of the African or ‘negro’ race and, further, it will not be allowed for them to appear on the same card), there is no reason nor law that calls for segregation in sports except it is the usual custom and practice.” Maintaining the status quo of segregation and relying on the hope that the race might achieve equality “someday” infuriated Hall. “New Orleans as a city should never stand up and proclaim democracy in our way of life as long as ‘custom and practice’ serves as its foundation for everyday living. For New Orleans, ‘Jim Crow sports situation’ is regarded today as one of the South’s worst. This writer asks, ‘New Orleans, what is your next move?”43
Toni might have asked the same question of herself. After leaving New Orleans, the Sea Lions headed north for games in the Midwest. On the bus ride through Arkansas and Missouri, Toni thought about the Creoles and how their team owner, Alan Page, carefully watched her play. Page was responsible for the good will many supporters felt toward the Creoles. “Genial Alan Page,” Jim Hall wrote time and again, as if “genial” were the promoter’s first name. Few baseball owners across the South were more innovative, more successful, or more of a risk taker than Alan Page. He was always “pull[ing] one from his bag of tricks,” observers said, including adding women to the game.
Lucille Bland remembered Alan Page saying, “If I could just find a girl.” Bland was a cashier at the Page Hotel, and her father was a close friend of the promoter’s. Page thought that if he could hire a young woman who knew baseball and was willing to travel with the team as a coach, the novelty would bring curious fans to the game. “He thought that would be the come-on,” Bland said. Page placed an advertisement in the newspaper, stipulating interested candidates had to know baseball and be “full of pep.”44 He couldn’t find a girl who met his criteria until he turned around one day and took a look at Lucille behind the cash register.
Lucille Bland loved sports, played basketball and baseball at Dillard, and read everything she could about her hero, Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Bland joined the Creoles as a third-base coach and sat in the front seat of the bus with her “dresser,” Inez, who made sure Lucille was attired in fashionable wear after the game. Mr. Page insisted she look stylish, Bland said. For two years, Bland traveled from New York to Texas and enjoyed the game’s showmanship. Lucille Bland knew how to entertain. “I’d get right in an umpire’s face and let him have it,” she said. Coaching the players, however, took a while to perfect. “At first they resented it immensely,” she said, but after they saw she understood the game, the men became more open to her suggestions. “I was a sister to them,” she said. An automobile accident in 1948 sidelined Bland, and she resigned her position with the Creoles.45
To fill her spot as the girl attraction, Page found Fabiola Wilson—“comely and dimpled,” his press release said—and “attractive” Gloria Dymond, both recent graduates of a local New Orleans high school. They were billed as “extra outfielders.” Wilson wasn’t an athlete, Bland said. She was the girlfriend of one of the Creole players.46 In Bland’s mind, Page did not regard the women as serious athletes, and Wilson and Dymond were gone in a year. If fans expected entertainment from Toni Stone when she played against the Creoles at Pelican Stadium, they were surprised. She was an exceptional athlete and a woman player Alan Page began to take seriously.
After their games in New Orle
ans, the Sea Lions headed north for a long and uncomfortable ride to Arkansas. Luggage rattled on top of the bus, and players hoped that a sudden downpour wouldn’t drench their somewhat clean clothes. Players talked, read the sports pages, got on each other’s nerves, or tried to wall off themselves from sensory intrusion, including the stench of sweat-drenched uniforms hanging in the back of the bus. Sometimes players broke up the numbing travel by throwing empty bottles at telephone poles as they passed at fifty-five miles an hour.47 A few players, like Toni, grew restless and searched for a little activity to break the monotony. “Playing the dozens” was a Sea Lions favorite. The dozens was a trash-talking game that tested the participants’ limits. Each player took turns insulting the other, the jabs increasing in flash and barb until one player couldn’t offer a response. Some people called the back-and-forth arguments “yo mamma fights,” and occasionally the game ended with a tussle of fists as tempers flared when the insults cut too close. Somewhere around Kansas City, BeeBop Gordon remembered, Toni and another Creole player, John Scroggins, got into it playing the dozens. Scroggins and Stone went back and forth, back and forth. Toni held her own, quickly slinging insults with more and more flair and wild word play until Scroggins sputtered and stammered and staggered into silence. “She got the better in that ‘discussion,’” BeeBop said. 48
Shortly afterward, Stone left the team.49 BeeBop thought Scrog-gins couldn’t stand losing face to a woman. Tensions on the bus became uncomfortable for Toni. But, more important, she found out that she was being paid less than the men on the Sea Lions. When Alan Page offered her a better deal, Toni knew it was time to go. In a matter of weeks, she was back at Pel Stadium in a hand-me-down uniform with CREOLES spelled in blue letters across her chest.* Toni quit the Sea Lions at the right moment. By the time the San Francisco team wrapped up games in Kansas City and headed to Canada, so many players had jumped to other squads that Yellowhorse Morris was left with only Sammy Workman to entertain fans. Even the white press noted Morris’s headaches. “Harold Morris, owner of the San Francisco Sea Lions, touring Negro baseball team, was a troubled man when he arrived in Regina Saskatchewan today—minus his team,” the New York Times reported. “He said his players jumped the club and signed to play with the Buchanan, Sask, All-Stars for the remainder of the season. The only ‘player’ Morris has left is Sammy Workman, an armless and legless performer who has been traveling with the team.” Morris reported that what was left of the Sea Lions team would stay in Canada until the end of August to drum up barnstorming games. He also indicated that former players could be deported to the United States “for jumping their bond.”50 The Sea Lions bus, minus any players to fill it, sat on the Canadian prairie until Morris hired a local to drive it back to California. No player felt too bad for Yellowhorse, though. The Chicago Cubs hired Morris to scout black players on the West Coast.51