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

by Martha Ackmann

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time…. Everyone seemed to be waiting, as I was waiting.1

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  As much as she loved the game, Toni put her baseball dreams on hold. She left New Orleans after the 1950 Creoles season ended and returned to Oakland. No one—not her teammates, not her friends back in San Francisco at Jack’s Tavern, not her sister Bunny, and not her family in Saint Paul—could have predicted what she was about to do. Toni Stone was getting married.

  Toni had given no indication that marriage was in her future. She displayed little romantic interest in men and rebuffed teammates who tried to make passes. When one player sexually harassed her on a team bus, she asked her manager to intervene. He told her to settle the matter herself, so Toni grabbed a baseball bat. She “hit that kid in the name of the Father and the Son,” she said. “I thought I was going to have to go to jail, but I got away with it. I had to prove I was tough.”2 When Toni did socialize with men, she usually went out with a group, joining other players for drinks and cigarettes after a game. “Saturday night was good for the soul,” she said.3 She enjoyed the camaraderie, although some wives and girlfriends found Toni’s friendships with the men inappropriate. They could not understand why a woman wanted to be “one of the guys” and assumed she was out to steal their men. Most of the Creole players, like her Twin City Colored Giants teammates, admitted that they did not regard Toni in romantic terms. “We didn’t think of her as a girl,” one said.4 If she dated, Toni didn’t let her team know. She kept that information to herself. “Dan Cupid will have to wait,” she told reporters.5 Family members said Toni rarely dressed up, put on makeup, or tried to appear conventionally attractive. Toni would wear a dress or skirt, if asked, for special occasions such as weddings or holidays. She would pose for a group photograph, and then slip out to her car where she had trousers and a shirt stashed in the trunk for a quick change.6

  Dressing as she did in men’s trousers, shirts, and shoes, many people assumed Toni was a lesbian. Cross-dressing women were commonly thought to be gay. While many considered the Bay Area a more liberal environment than other parts of the country, a cross-dressing woman still could be threatened, harassed, or even arrested by San Francisco vice squads. Local ordinances forbade anyone from impersonating with intent to deceive a member of the opposite sex. One woman admired clever cross-dressing lesbians who found a way to avoid being thrown in jail: they always wore women’s underwear. “If you wore one article of feminine apparel,” she said, vice squads “couldn’t book you.”7 The same was true for men in drag. Men got around the ordinance by wearing “I am a boy” tags pinned to their clothing.8 But anyone who knew Toni well would tell you that she rarely had close relationships with women. Friends and family could not recall one woman with whom Toni appeared especially intimate. She thought all women looked down on her, like her teammates’ girlfriends and the stylish girls from Rondo.9

  Above all, Toni preferred the company of older men—the old-timers who hung out at the meatpacking plants in Saint Paul, veteran ballplayers who shared baseball history with her, elderly gentlemen who frequented her father’s barbershop. Toni felt at ease around them, comfortable talking about the past, and comforted, perhaps, in assuming that older men would have no sexual interest in her. Perhaps that’s why she enjoyed Aurelious Pescia Alberga so much. The conversations they shared at Jack’s Tavern, the way he found a place for her on the American Legion team, and his admiration for her modest celebrity all made Toni feel important. When he asked, Toni accepted Alberga’s marriage proposal. The couple was married in San Francisco on December 23, 1950, at the city’s Municipal Court. Alberga was sixty-seven and Toni was twenty-nine. They settled into Alberga’s small Victorian home at 844 Isabella Street in Oakland.* Toni took the large first-floor bedroom and Alberga occupied a smaller one next to it. Toni called her husband “Pa.” He called her “dear sweetheart.”10 Having a husband “gave me respectability,” Toni said.11

  But Alberga did not give Toni his blessing to continue playing baseball. At his request, she sat out the 1951 summer baseball season and scrounged up odd jobs around Oakland. Alberga’s request was baffling. To everyone in California who knew him, Aurelious Alberga was one of the most prominent black leaders in the state. He had spent a lifetime pushing for equality. He spearheaded the California State Colored Republican League, which registered black voters. When he found out Toni was not a registered voter, he personally escorted her to City Hall.12 Alberga helped establish the Booker T. Washington Center in San Francisco when he saw that young blacks were not provided adequate athletic opportunities. He also was one of the founders of the Northern California NAACP and would have been incensed, as other black leaders were, when reports of possible Jim Crow bomb shelters began cropping up in news articles about the Cold War.13 As the motto of the California State Colored Republican League stated, Alberga stood for “free, equal and un-trampled political rights for all American citizens.”14 Except, it seems, when it came to his wife.

  Alberga’s attempt to rein in his wife’s ambitions may have sprung from two beliefs. When it came to gaining opportunities for blacks, Alberga was an accommodationist, an example of an older generation of leaders who thought that if they worked diplomatically with the white majority, more opportunities would come their way. Alberga could point to his patronage position as a bootblack in the Ferry Building as evidence that such strategies worked—at least minimally. In many ways, Alberga’s worldview was similar to Boykin Stone’s and the political legacy he inherited from Booker T. Washington. Blacks would gain equality by demonstrating that they were responsible, honest, hardworking, and reliable citizens; equality had to be earned by securing the respect and approval of the white majority. By continuing to “force” her way further up the ladder of professional baseball, Toni may have appeared to Alberga to be too assertive, even militant, in her desire to open doors that whites had not cracked open yet. Political leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois, who called for racial injustices to be challenged and who argued that white domination was a threat to all democracy, assumed a philosophical stance that felt threatening to men such as Alberga. It was one thing to slowly assimilate into white culture; it was quite another to demand white culture radically change. Alberga may have viewed his wife’s angling for a better position in professional baseball as simply too much, too fast.

  Like many other male leaders at the time, Alberga’s efforts to reverse racial discrimination did not include ending sexism. Many leaders believed women could best influence political action by influencing their husbands’ decisions or by demonstrating their worth in the domestic sphere. Alberga certainly knew he wasn’t marrying a woman whose identity would be formed by housekeeping or childrearing. His indifference to the disenfranchisement of women wasn’t rooted in a conviction that black women should not be accorded the same rights as men. He simply didn’t recognize their struggles. He could not apply his understanding of racism to the prejudice that Toni faced as a woman. It was a blind spot, but a temporary one. Years later, when reflecting on the absence of women in early political battles in California, Alberga admitted that he and other men failed to reach across gender lines. “When I say [women] weren’t interested,” he confessed, “I mean they could have been, but we didn’t take the time to interest ourselves in them.”15 Toni’s family members believed there was another reason “Uncle Pescia” wanted Toni to stay away from baseball in 1951. He wanted her to help out around the house.16 His home needed repair, and Alberga was growing physically unable to keep up with the maintenance. Toni could paint, clean, build, or restore anything. She would take on maintaining their house and marriage first, then her career.

  As baffling as Alberga’s edict to Toni was, her response was equally puzzling. It seemed improbable that a woman who had surmounted so many obstacles and vowed to make baseball her life could be persuaded to give it up. Gabby Street, her unlikely patron, died in F
ebruary 1951, and Toni may have felt that at age thirty she belonged to an earlier era of baseball that was vanishing. Semi-pro teams such as the New Orleans Black Pelicans were folding. Even Alan Page in New Orleans was having a tough time of it. When Page had a disagreement with local park officials before one game, he abruptly removed his team from the field. Fans stormed the ticket office, jumped the fence, and swamped Page, demanding their money back. Police eventually restored order but not before Page lost his wallet and his keys.17 If “genial Alan Page” found himself in the middle of a fracas, what could happen next to the world of baseball that Toni knew?

  But more than concern about her age, worries about the future of the game, or even jitters about her safety, it was more likely that Toni took the year off to test herself. She may have looked upon her marriage and 1951 as a kind of crucible—the final test of her drive and dedication to the game. On some inchoate level, Toni may have accepted Alberga’s request in order to determine if she could live without baseball and adjust to conventional life. Toni had been running from an orthodox vision of herself since she was a girl in the confessionalbooth at St. Peter Claver. If, after twelve months away from baseball, she found that she could not live without the game—then the vow she made in Memphis might be stronger. Tested faith is strong faith, every Catholic girl knew.

  After a year, Toni had her answer: her passion for baseball was not diminished. Absence taught Toni that she relished the physical demands of the sport, needed the affirmation it provided, and grew in dignity and self-respect from doing what she loved. What emerged from deprivation was a deeper understanding of her true self. For Toni that consciousness was as certain and sharp as the crack of a bat.

  Toni’s temporary separation from baseball provided another revelation as well. She realized that there were other women like her who also loved playing the game. World War II and its aftermath had upended countless assumptions about what women could do. Once women proved they could work in male-dominated professions such as Bay Area shipyards, it was not long before one enterprising businessman proposed they could play baseball as well. Philip Wrigley devised a plan to form a women’s professional baseball league when the major leagues were weakened by players leaving for military service. Wrigley, who owned the Chicago Cubs, contacted other baseball executives and combed the country looking for talented young women who could play the game and look ladylike doing it. They found their athletes, and in 1943 the league began with four teams in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.* A year later, Minnesota also had a team, the Minneapolis Millerettes, and by 1948 the league more than doubled in size. Wrigley placed his emphasis on building teams in medium-size cities in the Midwest, but even Chicago became part of the league in 1948 with the Chicago Colleens.* Toni wanted to join the growing women’s league and wrote executives asking for a tryout.18 There was one problem. The League was segregated. Black women were not included. A discussion during a 1951 AAGPBL Board of Directors meeting revealed the consensus was against the “idea of colored players unless they would show promise of exceptional ability.”19 Toni kept waiting for an answer to the inquiry she sent the AAGPBL, but never received one. When some white players later found out that Toni had requested a tryout, they were disappointed that the league had ignored her. “I don’t know why we didn’t have blacks,” Mame Redman, a catcher for the 1950 Grand Rapids Chicks, later said. The league’s executive-level bigotry bewildered her, and she empathized with the barriers Toni faced. “I felt sorry for her,” Redman said.20

  The disappointment Toni encountered as a woman seeking to play professional baseball was not new. There were, of course, other women before her who tried to make a living in the sport. A few female “base-ballists” had played for short stints in front of paying fans and a curious public since the late nineteenth century. Several women also played on men’s teams. Elizabeth “Lizzie” Stroud Arlington played for Pennsylvania men’s teams in the Atlantic League in 1898. Lizzie Murphy played against the Boston Red Sox in a benefit game at Fenway Park in 1922.† In 1931, Jackie Mitchell famously struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game between the New York Yankees and the Chattanooga Lookouts, an AA team in the Southern Association. Isabelle Baxter reportedly played second base for the Cleveland Colored Giants in 1932 and 1933.* Frances Dunlop of the men’s Fayetteville Bears played against the Cassville Blues in a 1936 Class D Arkansas-Missouri League game. Yet no woman had come as far in breaking into the ranks of men’s professional baseball as Toni Stone.

  That is, until a young white woman signed a contract in June 1952 to play minor league ball in Pennsylvania. Eleanor Engle was a twenty-four-year-old stenographer who played shortstop in a local women’s softball league. The Harrisburg Senators, a minor league men’s team in the Class B Interstate League, were in seventh place and desolate. The Senators’ manager thought Engle might add punch to the lineup and pump up ticket sales. But before Engle could take to the field, baseball’s minor league boss, George Trautman—Gabby Street’s old friend—nullified Engle’s contract, putting an end to the possibility of women in the white minor leagues. In a telegram from San Francisco, Trautman wrote, “I am notifying all clubs that signing of women players by National Association clubs will not be tolerated and clubs, signing or attempting to sign women players, will be subject to severe penalties.” Major league Commissioner Ford Frick agreed. “I have consulted with Commissioner Frick,” Trautman added, “and he has asked me to express his concurrence in the view that this is just not in the best interest of baseball that such travesties be tolerated.”21 Engle’s career was short-lived: there would be no female “travesties” in the major or minor leagues. But Toni had heard doomsday predictions before. Some sportswriters had forecast that major league baseball would be destroyed when Jackie Robinson entered the game.†

  With the white major and minor leagues off-limits for the time being and the AAGBL ignoring her, Toni saw one viable option open to her: the Negro League. The league had lost some of its luster since Jackie Robinson integrated the majors in 1947 and a stream of younger players such as Willie Mays, Toni’s former opponent, had joined him.* Owners of Negro League baseball teams were all too aware that the slump in gate receipts made it difficult to meet payrolls. One evening after a game, Buck O’Neil called Tom Baird. “How’d we do?” Baird, the owner, asked on the phone. The team won, Monarchs manager O’Neil said, 4–2. “I don’t mean the score,” Baird shouted back. “I mean the attendance.”22 Fans in the stands were more important than game results and standings, O’Neil found out. Many followers of black ball thought the number of teams able to draw a crowd would continue to dwindle; some thought the entire league would die, the ironic victim of integration. But men like Baird and O’Neil could confirm that the league had had its ups and downs before and had been successful in adjusting to the times and reinventing itself. Perhaps the moment for metamorphosis was again upon black baseball. Baird already had evidence that the league had become a pipeline to the majors, as Jim Hall in New Orleans and others had suggested. Baird received phone calls and letters every day from players eager to show what they could do. The Negro League, Baird pronounced, was now officially “a springboard.”23 Baird’s letters to New York Yankee farm system director Lee MacPhail said as much. “Do you want me to contact you before I make any deal with the New York Giants?” Baird asked. “I feel as though I am a part of the Yankee organization and want to give you first chance at my players that your organization might want.”24 Branch Rickey, who understood the pace of integration better than most, predicted that by 1952 or 1953 every minor league team—including those in the Deep South—would want to sign black players. White minor league teams would be eager to discover untapped talent, he forecast. “The only question will be, finding enough Negroes with sufficient ability to meet the demand.”25

  Born out of passion for the sport and a repudiation of racism, the Negro League had a proud tradition. Black athletes had been playing integrated baseball in the ninetee
nth century until 1887 when an unwritten understanding—what some called a “gentlemen’s agreement”—banned future contracts with blacks in the white International League.* Baseball, like society as a whole, shifted toward more racial segregation after Reconstruction, which most people viewed as a failed effort.26 By the turn of the century, the impact of the ban could be seen around the country; with a few exceptions, Jim Crow baseball was the rule in every state. In the wake of segregated play, Andrew “Rube” Foster, a pitcher, manager, and booking agent for the Leland Giants (later the Chicago American Giants), had been thinking of ways to bring together the jumble of black teams in the Midwest—barnstorming, semi-pro, and independent squads. On February 13, 1920, at the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City, Foster and a gathering of other black baseball executives founded the Negro National League.† Foster’s monumental effort “paved the way,” players said. He and the other league founders were like “the wagons going West.”27 The league began with eight teams: Foster’s Chicago American Giants, Joe Greene’s Chicago Giants, the Dayton Marcos, the Detroit Stars, the Indianapolis ABCs, the Kansas City Monarchs, the St. Louis Giants, and the Cuban Stars. Meanwhile, Thomas T. Wilson, owner of the Nashville Elite Giants, also organized in 1920 the Negro Southern League, composed of his Nashville team and competitors in Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, Montgomery, and New Orleans. Impressed with the success of the Southern and National leagues, Edward H. Bolden became chair of the Eastern Colored League, which included the Hilldale Club, the Cuban Stars (East), the Brooklyn Royal Giants, the Bacharach Giants, the Lincoln Giants, and the Baltimore Black Sox. Black baseball became the top entertainment for urban black residents. By 1924, the Eastern League and the National League held their first World Series competition. A series of misfortunes, however, nearly caused the death of organized black baseball. A gas leak came close to killing Rube Foster, and his subsequent errant behavior landed him in an asylum. Business pressures took a toll on Bolden, and he, too, was institutionalized. By 1928, Bolden’s Eastern Colored League collapsed. Rube Foster died in 1930, leaving the National League without direction. In 1932, the Chicago Defender said organized black baseball was over.