Toni Stone was the first African-American female player in Negro League baseball. She was an athlete who refused to play women’s softball and would subsequently be picked up by the men’s teams.
She started with the Twin City Colored Giants, a local boys team in St. Paul, Minn., in the 1930s, despite the pressures to marry and become a mother.
From that point on, Stone would make her name permanent among the teams, eventually gaining a spot on the Indianapolis Clowns, replacing the legendary Hank Aaron when he moved to the majors.
In 1949, Stone lost an argument with the owner of the San Francisco Sea Lions about her pay rate, so when the team traveled to New Orleans for a game, she left and joined the Black Pelicans, then the New Orleans Creoles. Stone was making $300 a month playing ball, which was impressive in 1949.
She would take the field against baseball greats like Ernie Banks and Willie Mays, and, as a team member of the Kansas City Monarchs, she recalls that her proudest memory was getting a hit against Satchel Paige in 1953.
The female pioneer had a batting average of .364, which was the fourth highest average in the Negro League during the time.
Playing in the league was especially difficult for Stone as a Black woman, having to deal with the issues of Jim Crow. She dealt with the same “Black only” barriers on the road, but her own team members would tell her to “go home and make some biscuits for her husband.”
Even so, all the teams benefited from her publicity – having a woman on the diamond to draw a crowd.
For the love of the game, Stone lied about her age by 10 years and continued to play ball well into her 60s.
In 1993, she was inducted into the Women’s Sports Hall of Fame.
The following is an excerpt from Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League by Martha Ackmann (Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press; June 2010):
“It didn’t daunt her that she was a 29-year-old woman masquerading as a teenager trying to make it in America’s most sacred sport. ‘I figured that then was the time for me to make the grade as the first woman player,’ she said.
“Years later, when she looked back at that moment in Memphis, she realized it was a turning point in her life. It was there that she vowed to go as far as she could in professional baseball.”
– From chapter five, entitled “Finding the Heart of the Game.”
