Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League

by Martha Ackmann

  When she did get into the game, Toni was cold and batted a miserable .105 during league games. Syd Pollock’s words from the previous year’s game in St. Louis came back to mind. She was trying too hard; her swings were forced and overeager. She also was gaining weight. Toni had packed on twelve pounds above her 135-pound playing weight. She placed herself on a two-week diet, cutting out bread and sweets.34 The more she sat, the more frustrated and restless she became. During off-hours, she was no longer satisfied with watching others play or studying baseball books. “That’s not going to get it,” she fumed—angry at herself as much as she was with others. “You have to execute your ability,” she said.35 It was as though she had lost what once came naturally for her.

  By the end of the first half of the season, the Monarchs were in last place, with June’s only bright spot another perfect game. This time a twenty-three-year-old right-hander earned the accolades, blanking the Clowns 6–0 in Cincinnati. “Speedy, young ambitious ball hungry kids” were dominating the team, Buck said. 36 Many of the new players were Cuban and had played the year before for the Havana Cuban Giants, a team that served as the Monarchs’ farm team. “They wanted the young ballplayers, especially the Latins to be seen by the major league scouts,” Toni said.37 The standout youngster for the Monarchs was a twenty-year-old first baseman from Havana, Francisco “Pan-cho” Herrera, who was hitting over .300 and knocking 450-foot grand slams. The Clowns also were stocking up on young players and added a seventeen-year-old infielder and an eighteen-year-old pitcher to the team. Outstanding players such as the Clowns’ Ray Neil, who had grabbed the league’s batting title in 1953 and shared second base with Toni, knew they would be overlooked by scouts who considered them too old. The line on Neil was that he “can’t be considered a Big League prospect because he has celebrated at least 30 birthdays.”38 Even Jackie Robinson wondered if 1954 would be his last season. At thirty-five, Jackie was dubbed the “graying old man” by reporters.39 Club owners such as Syd Pollock and Tom Baird almost put a higher priority on signing a young rookie than on winning the Negro League championship. A talented young rookie certainly stood a greater chance of bringing the team financial rewards if he turned out to be major league material. Even convincing a young player to sign was considered a success as some teenage prospects felt they no longer needed to use black ball as a stepping stone to the big leagues. Baird offered a fifteen-year-old sensation out of Omaha a contract with the Monarchs, but the young pitcher turned him down.* As more black players entered the major leagues, “the Kansas City Monarchs were not the be-all and end-all for a Negro ball player,” Bob Gibson, the Omaha pitching sensation, said.40

  But just when Toni despaired at being benched, new opportunity gave her hope. Thanks in part to the excitement she had generated among fans during the last season’s play, Syd and Baird were able to book the big stadiums for July: Connie Mack in Philadelphia and even the colossus of stadiums, Yankee Stadium in New York City. The Monarchs had trudged through so many small towns during the 1954 season: Creston, Iowa; Sikeston, Missouri; Holt, Alabama. Even if Toni had played in more games, few people would have noticed. Back in Norfolk, sports columnist Cal Jacox wrote that “as far as the baseball fan in the Southeast is concerned, the [Negro League] does not exist. Negro baseball has the strange habit of groping in the dark in its relations with the public and this year appears to be no exception.”41 But with the Philadelphia and New York bookings, fans in big cities who had never seen her play finally would get a chance to see “the much publicized infielder Miss Toni Stone.”42 Syd Pollock knew the Philadelphia game would be especially important to Connie Morgan, and he gave her a handful of complimentary tickets to distribute to family and friends in the area. Students from William Penn business school were giddy with excitement and looked for their classmate before the game. They found her in the Clowns dugout out and descended on Connie with warm wishes. Connie said they “spoke to me and hugged me and kissed me and wished me good luck.”43

  Weather for the Sunday doubleheader at Yankee Stadium could not have been better. The warm summer day brought peak crowds to area beaches. Both Baird and Pollock had been reporting brisk sales for the game as the announcement had circulated for weeks in black newspapers from the Midwest to the East Coast. But promotional talk of hot-selling tickets did not translate into big gate receipts. Seventy-five hundred fans watched as the Clowns and the Monarchs split the twin bill. While some were surprised that the crowd was as large as it was, attendance did not compare to the number of fans attending the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants games that afternoon. Six times the number of home fans crowded their games to cheer Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, Monte Irvin, and Willie Mays, who was back with the Giants after his stint in the army. If fans cheered Toni at Yankee Stadium and if she did well at the plate, no one knew. Reporters wrote nothing about her play. Connie Morgan and Peanut Johnson received no mention, either. The bench jockeying and Toni’s mounting frustration gnawed at her and affected her play. “I did myself in,” she realized.44 The game Toni hoped would turn things around for her garnered less attention and attracted fewer spectators than the amphitheatre concert of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammer-stein music over at City College. The great black baritone William Warfield “brought down the house as expected,” the New York Times reported, with his rendition of “Ol’ Man River.” What made the performance especially memorable, the newspaper said, was its “easy, unforced delivery.”45

  For Toni, the rest of the 1954 season was labored. The week after the game in Yankee Stadium, she celebrated her thirty-third birthday. It was not much of a celebration. After the long haul from the East Coast, she was back in Kansas City again for a night game against Buster Haywood and the Memphis Red Sox. Buck gave Toni a rare start and she led off the batting order. But again she could not find her intuitive swing. Toni went 0–2 with a grounder and a strikeout. By cruel contrast, the rest of the team enjoyed a slugfest, and the Monarchs won the game 8–0.46 When she returned to her hotel room later that evening, she tried to console herself by rereading the birthday card Alberga had sent from Oakland. A few days later, in Salina, Kansas, she sat down and wrote her husband. She told him her injured finger was healing, but the hot summer weather was almost unbearable. Recently, she wrote, the team played in 118-degree heat. She avoided telling Pa the worst and did not mention how small irritations were growing larger and engulfing her. Not a word, for example, about the nightly bathroom aggravation. “Two boys would be going in the tub,” she later said, “two a piece.” After their shift, another set would go in. The rotation continued until sometimes as late as midnight with Toni still waiting to get her turn. “When they got through there was no hot water for me,” she said. She tried to talk with Buck about it and asked to be placed on another floor where she would have a better access to the bathroom, but nothing changed. While she knew she had to get along with the team, there were moments when the men’s behavior felt like intentional harassment. “Things could have been a little more comfortable,” she said. “I know when I was goin’ to go into this, it was goin’ to be tough.” But the mounting irritations hurt, she said. The team seemed to “figure any way to keep me miserable.” One old-timer in Peoria, seeking to offer Toni comfort, took her aside and said, “There’s gonna be days when you feel like killing yourself.” The degradation, the frustration, the long, physically exhausting days could bring a player to the breaking point. One afternoon after a warm-up practice when teammates teased her by purposefully hitting balls she couldn’t reach, Toni hit her limit. “I just got real angry,” she said, and after the game she wandered by herself into a liquor store. Toni bought a bottle of Mr. Boston’s—an “old cheap bottle of liquor,” she said—and sat on a curb and drank until she got drunk. She felt that all the years of struggling to play baseball had amounted to nothing. “I could of just died,” she said.47

  When voting results came in for the East-West game in August, Toni’s name was not on the roster. The news br
oke her spirit. For the second year in a row, fans did not choose Toni to be among the Negro League All-Stars. Connie Morgan was not selected either, and Mamie Johnson was no longer in the running. The Clowns released Peanut, the Norfolk (Virginia) Journal and Guide reported. “You know I have played hard Poppie to go to the East & West game,” Toni wrote to her husband. “My name was not on the list.” Her disappointment cascaded into disillusionment about her entire career, and she could no longer hide her despair. “My years in Negro baseball [have] not meant anything,” she wrote. “The owner has capitalized me … that’s all.” To Toni, team owners and players seemed interested only in money—“peddling flesh,” she called it.48 They were not focused on improving their abilities or winning championships. The Monarchs had come to conduct themselves less like a team than a collection of independent agents out to get the best deals, she thought. Why would it matter to self-interested players if a team won a championship, Toni asked? They only wanted to move out of the Negro League and on to the majors. “Baseball is a business,” she wrote, “and now I have to capitalize for myself.” Toni told Pa she would look into barnstorming at the end of the season and then added in a small script at the bottom of the page, “Don’t nobody want to win a champ?”49

  The rest of the Monarchs began to feel the weariness of the road as well. In a game against the Clowns in Joplin, Missouri, the teams committed eleven errors before a meager crowd of fourteen hundred fans. Players looked “lackadaisical” and “worn out,” the Kansas City Call reported. Later, in a game with Detroit, a reporter observed that “both teams displayed a half-heartedness in the field that left several fans wondering.” During a rainout in Kansas City, even the groundskeepers were so exhausted that they “abandoned their job in the downpour” and left the field looking like a lake.50 Fatigue spilled over into spite as well. Buster Haywood was so fed up with an erratic pitcher he gave the youngster a handful of bills at a rest stop, instructed him to buy the team sandwiches, and then drove off without him.51 In locker rooms before a game, Buck O’Neil could hear opposing players sharpening their steel cleats in hopes an aggressive slide would slice a Monarch guarding the bag. “Hey, Buck,” they would yell between locker room walls. “Hear that?”52 Umpire Motley knew players also placed rocks in their gloves for aggressive tags. They would smash loaded gloves across the face of an opposing runner, hoping to stun or disorient him, he said.53 Motley even saw spite turn to violence one night on the Monarchs bus when Hank Baylis came charging after him with a knife after what the infielder thought had been a bad call during the evening’s game.54

  Then there was the incident with Toni at home plate. Always intense when she was at bat, Toni flew into a rage when she was called out on a pitch that she believed was a ball. She jumped on the catcher’s back and the crowd went wild with delight. Everyone in the stands thought Toni’s explosion was trumped up and part of the show, as amusing as King Tut’s clowning. What they didn’t know was what the catcher said as the ball flew over the plate. “Pussy high,” he yelled as the ump called her out. Days later, Toni did not know what angered her most: the wrong call, the catcher’s demeaning attempt at a joke, or the pleasure Buck O’Neil seemed to get in telling the story over and over again.55

  On Saturday, August 28, Doc Young, a columnist for the Chicago Defender, delivered the season’s final word on women in baseball. “Toss ’Em Out,” the headline read in a stinging indictment of Toni’s entire career. “Girls should be run out of men’s baseball on a softly padded rail,” Young wrote. “When Miss Stone, who appears to be a woman of unusual athletic ability, was signed last year, the report was … that she had earned her chance with three years of professional competition.” But she was a joke, Young said. Her presence threatened men’s morale and made them feel “pretty silly.” Men who praised her tenacity were disingenuous, he said, and only looking out for their own jobs. If a girl is athletic, let her play a feminine sport such as tennis or maybe wrestle with other girls, Young suggested. “When the time comes that a woman’s affections depend on her batting average, the world will be a sorry place in which to live,” he wrote. “It’s thrilling to have a woman in one’s arms, and a man has a right to promise the world to his beloved—just so long as that world doesn’t include the right to play baseball with men.” The entire social order could be toppled if women like Toni Stone were allowed to keep playing baseball. “This could get to be a woman’s world,” Young warned, “with men just living in it!”56

  By the end of 1954, the Monarchs were in last place, and the Clowns had won both the first and the second half of the season. Toni’s official line in Negro League games was a .197 average with thirteen singles and doubles in seventy-one times at bat. She posted three RBIs, walked seven times, and struck out eight.* Once again, there was no record of her performance during the majority of contests that were not sanctioned Negro League games. Kansas City signed to barnstorm for a month throughout Missouri and Kansas until autumn made playing baseball in the Midwest too cold. The season closed with increased grumblings and occasional flare-ups on the bus, some between Toni and the Cuban players. She resented that the Cubans seemed to dominate the roster and believed they were on the team only because they would play for less than black players. The altercations were not Toni’s finest moments and revealed how grasping she had become. Just as many men begrudged her desire to play baseball, Toni also at times diminished the ambitions of Cuban players. After one argument, Toni stood up and asked which players on the bus were with her. No one said a word.

  When the end finally came, it occurred in the most mundane of circumstances. Toni found Buck and some of the players in a garage trying to coax one more trip out of the Monarchs bus. While she could not say exactly why, Toni felt as if she was standing at an impasse. As the men crowded around the bus, she asked for a word with O’Neil. They started talking but the conversation descended into bickering. Later, Toni could not remember what the two fought about. They could have argued about the bench jockeying or the forced twist of her swing or even Buck’s delight in retelling the “pussy high” story. She could not retrieve the specifics. When other players in the garage joined in and the exchange grew hot, Toni looked to her skipper for defense. But Buck “stood there and looked simple,” she said. “Did not do nothin’ in my defense,” she said, “in my defense whatsoever.” The moment staring face-to-face with Buck O’Neil froze in Toni’s memory for the rest of her life. It was as if everything in her life changed in that single instant. All she could say later was that “something was missing.” 57 It was not that she had lost O’Neil’s support, as angry as she was with him. In truth, she had lost something much deeper. Standing in a dirty garage in the outskirts of the Midwest, Toni Stone lost what she never thought would abandon her. She lost her joy for the game.

  At the end of the season, Toni turned in her uniform to the Monarchs bus driver. She collected her four hundred dollars for the last month’s pay, but did not receive the two-hundred-dollar end-of-the-year bonus from owner Tom Baird. In October word came that the Philadelphia Athletics, a major league team, would be moving to Kansas City and taking up residence in Blues Stadium. Trying to sound optimistic, Tom Baird declared that the city was big enough for two teams, but others worried that the new Kansas City Athletics would be the death of the Monarchs. Connie Morgan returned to Philadelphia and re-enrolled in accounting courses at William Penn business school. She would not be with the Clowns the next season. While she enjoyed traveling with the team, Syd’s press releases said her real objective was “to be a top-flight worker in a business office.”58 Just weeks after the close of the 1954 season, word came that Oscar Charleston was dead. The big man—some said he was so strong he could tear the horsehair off a baseball with one hand—had died of a heart attack at age fifty-seven. A few months later, Wendell Smith reported that Syd Pollock’s Indianapolis Clowns were “throwing in the sponge,” dropping out of the Negro League to play independent ball the coming season. Bunny Downs gave
Syd his notice and quit as the Clowns’ longtime road manager. His diabetes had grown worse, and he couldn’t look at one more year riding on Big Red. “Bus baseball ain’t right for anybody as old as I am,” he said. “It’s downright intolerable.” Buck O’Neil began making calls to friends in Chicago. If the Monarchs ever go under, associates told him, let the Cubs know. There might be a job for him in the majors.

  In Oakland, Toni’s older sister, Blanche, and her daughter Maria visited from Saint Paul. The Stone women loved California, and Alberga was at his most courtly squiring them around the Bay Area. There was talk that Blanche, Maria, and even Toni’s mother might actually move to the West Coast. Willa Stone wanted to start a new beauty parlor in Oakland and had ideas about buying an apartment building. All the changes swirled around Toni like an approaching thunderstorm. She packed her baseball glove and put the cleats that Gabby Street had given her back in their worn box. The trip back to Oakland seemed exceedingly long. “I got tired,” she said. “I got so tired.”59

  *James Leslie Wilkinson pitched for an Iowa semi-pro team until a broken wrist ended his playing career. In addition to owning the Monarchs, Wilkinson also served as the secretary of the Negro National League and treasurer of the Negro American League. He was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame in 2006 when he was acknowledged as “the man most responsible for saving black baseball during the Great Depression” (http://web.baseball halloffame.org/hofers/detail.jsp?playerId=506642).

  *Thomas Y. Baird was born in 1885 in Madison County, Arkansas, and later moved with his parents to Kansas City, Kansas. After his railroad accident—which left him with a limp for the rest of his life—Baird opened a billiard parlor and began his involvement with the business of baseball (David Conrads, “Biography of Thomas Y. Baird,” Kansas City Public Library, Missouri Valley Special Collections, 1999).