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

by Martha Ackmann

  Enter Cumberland Posey and Gus Greenlee. William Augustus “Gus” Greenlee was the owner of the famous Crawford Grill in the Pittsburgh Hill District. Luminaries such as Billy Eckstine, Lena Horne, and Sarah Vaughn entertained crowds, and Satchel Paige sang with the Mills Brothers during late night improvisations.28 Greenlee was also a bootlegger and a numbers runner, and his wealth enabled him in 1930 to buy the Pittsburgh Crawfords and build it into an East Coast champion. Future Hall of Famers such as Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, William Julius “Judy” Johnson, and Oscar Charleston played for the Crawfords. When Greenlee became disgusted because his team was not allowed to use whites-only locker rooms at Forbes Field, he built his own stadium, Greenlee Field, further adding to his business clout. Cumberland Willis “Cum” Posey was Pittsburgh’s other black baseball powerhouse. In 1910 he organizedblack steelworkers into the Homestead Grays ball club, named for the industrial neighborhood southeast of Pittsburgh.* For the next thirty-five years, he built the Grays into one of organized baseball’s most accomplished teams, first as a player, then as an owner. Posey earned distinction through his aggressive recruiting. He developed teams that won eight pennants and three world titles. Posey also was a vocal critic of black baseball, not only calling for an end to clowning on Syd Pollock’s teams but also criticizing booking agents for unprofitable schedules.

  Posey attempted to revive black baseball by organizing an East-West League, but the league collapsed after a single season in 1932, becoming another victim of the Depression. By the next year, however, Greenlee established a second incarnation of the Negro National League (NNL) that included teams in the East. In 1933, he also inaugurated the highly successful East-West All-Star game, played annually at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Teams in the Midwest and the South reconstituted themselves in 1937 as the Negro American League. With the success of Posey’s Grays and stellar players such as Buck Leonard bringing attention to the game, black baseball was back on track. That is, until the prospect of integration became a reality. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, commissioner of major league baseball and an ardent segregationist, died in 1945. Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, former governor and senator from Kentucky and a man open to integration, succeeded him. Less than a year after Chandler became commissioner, Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Writing to Branch Rickey, Chandler stated, “It isn’t my job to decide which colors can play big league baseball. It is my job to see that the game is fairly played and that everybody has an equal chance.”29

  After Robinson’s signing, black baseball again was forced to reinvent itself—this time as one league, with the Negro American League absorbing six teams from the National.* By 1950, the once great teams such as the Homestead Grays and Newark Eagles were no longer financially viable. They became independent barnstorming teams or aligned themselves with semi-pro leagues. In 1952, when Toni began thinking seriously about her chances in professional black baseball, there were six teams still operating in the Negro League: the Birmingham Black Barons, the Chicago American Giants, the Indianapolis Clowns, the Kansas City Monarchs, the Memphis Red Sox, and the Philadelphia Stars. Some teams were in better financial shape than others.

  Syd Pollock of the Indianapolis Clowns was in more of a whirlwind than usual.† The Clowns were the 1951 Negro League champions and had recently sold the contracts of two players to the Boston Braves. Initially Negro League teams had to fight to have their player contracts recognized by major league baseball. Some executives in the majors refused to honor players’ agreements with Negro League teams, taking advantage of the league’s often sloppy record keeping and stealing away players when contracts were lost or never fully executed. Other major league scouts blatantly raided black team rosters without regard to financial compensation. Newark Eagles co-owner Effa Manley led the fight to have black teams rightfully compensated.‡ Her battle made it possible for team owners like Pollock to add to their revenue by selling players’ contracts. As pleased as Pollock was to see players move to the majors, he also knew he would have to fill their missing spots on the Clowns. As he looked at the team roster for the upcoming 1952 season, Pollock knew he was short on infielders. His old friend Ed Scott, who had barnstormed with the Clowns in the late 1930s, was currently managing the Mobile Black Bears, a semi-pro team. Scott had a great young shortstop who could “rip the hide off a baseball,” he told Syd.30 Pollock and the team business manager, McKinley “Bunny” Downs, thought Scotty’s prospect was worth a look.

  At first, he didn’t look like much of a hitter. Seventeen-year-old Henry Aaron was five-foot-six and 150 pounds. “Six o’clock” was how the Aaron family described themselves: no fat and straight up and down.31 In addition, Aaron had a quiet demeanor that led some scouts to think he was not aggressive enough. But Scotty said Aaron was one of the best wrist hitters he had ever seen; Aaron said he was built up from hauling twenty-five-pound blocks of ice. The youngster also had an odd, crossover way of holding the bat. While right-handed, Aaron placed his left hand above his right when he squared off at the plate. When Downs and Pollock watched him swing, Syd called out, “You’re looking good, but when you’re right handed, you grip the bat with your left hand on the bottom.”32 Even with his unconventional grip, Aaron cleaned up that day, hitting a long ball and a double or two.33 Pollock appreciated what Scotty had seen and offered Aaron an application on the spot. “Treat the Clowns like a minor league club,” Scotty urged his prodigy, “a stop on your way to the big money—$5,000 a year in the majors.” Several months later, when Aaron secured his parents’ permission to join the Clowns, Bunny Downs was overjoyed. “God done sent me a miracle,” Downs said.34 The Indianapolis Clowns had their shortstop for the 1952 season.

  When Aaron reported to spring training the next year—a cold and raw few days in Winston-Salem—he did not make an immediate impression on his teammates. He was respectful and shy, hardly an attention-grabbing hot shot. Even though he was young and admittedly inexperienced in the world outside Mobile, Aaron knew that veterans on the team still would be suspicious of him. Like Toni, Aaron realized that a rookie could cost a veteran ballplayer a job, and he may have cringed when his name began appearing on the team’s posters. Rather than carousing with the team after a doubleheader, Aaron spent time with James Jenkins, a Bible-reading outfielder the team called Preacher. Jenkins tried to teach Aaron how to save money. Every day the older player took one of the two dollars each player received for meal money and mailed it home to his wife. Traveling with the Clowns that spring from Texas to Oklahoma, back to North Carolina, and then up the East Coast to Washington, D.C., Aaron saw sights he never thought he’d see. One scene always remained with him. After a rain-out at Griffith Stadium, the team went to a restaurant near the field. As the players finished their meals, restaurant workers gathered the plates to take them back to the kitchen. As Henry got up to leave, he heard the sound of dishes being thrown to the floor and breaking into hundreds of pieces. Young and inexperienced as he was, Aaron knew what was going on. Once a black ate off a plate, the dish was useless. “If dogs had eaten off those plates, they’d have washed them,” he said.35

  Aaron’s unique crossover grip continued to serve him well that summer with the Clowns. By June 1952, he was leading the Negro League in doubles, RBIs, and home runs. Aaron’s hitting and fielding were “a revelation,” the Pittsburgh Courier declared.36 Scouts from the Giants, the Pirates, the Reds, and the Braves were eyeing him and sending reports back to the majors. At the beginning of June 1952, both the Braves and the Pirates still were lobbying intensely for Aaron’s Clowns contract. The Boston Braves won out. Aaron finished his commitment to Indianapolis in a doubleheader at Comiskey Park, then took a single-engine plane to Wisconsin and the Braves’ class C minor league club in Eau Claire. Syd Pollock gave Henry a cardboard suitcase. That was “my signing bonus,” Aaron said.37

  With Aaron gone, the Indianapolis Clowns and Syd Pollock found themselves in the same predicament they’d been
in a year ago. The Clowns won the 1952 Negro League championship, their third in a row, but the team’s roster and the league again were in flux. Five more players left the Clowns after the 1952 season, moving to the majors or leagues in Canada or Latin America. The fabled Chicago American Giants and the Philadelphia Stars bowed out of the league. The number of teams in the league fell down to four: the Clowns, the Monarchs, the Memphis Red Sox, and the Birmingham Black Barons. Although the league was shrinking, the number of black men clamoring for a spot on any team was far from dwindling. When executives with the semi-pro Dallas Eagles announced a tryout for black players, over two hundred men rushed the gates. The team expected fifty prospects to show up.38 But finding players who were exceptional athletes and who could adapt to long hours on the road and the Clowns’ unique brand of showmanship was difficult. Pollock knew from experience that sometimes four or five athletes had to be tried out before a suitable replacement could be found.39 During the offseason, he signed several new players, including a shortstop, an outfielder, and a couple of pitchers. But the team still needed an addition like Henry Aaron who was sure to bring in fans. As the Creoles’ Alan Page said, a team needed someone who could “hang a glittering star over his locker.”40

  Looking back years later, Syd Pollock’s son thought the team should have seen it coming. “Toni Stone and Dad were destined for each other,” Alan Pollock said. “Both did what they loved and nothing and nobody interfered…. They were two … lines heading to intersect.” 41 The Indianapolis Clowns had played enough games with the New Orleans Creoles over the last three years to remember Toni Stone. Bunny Downs even had come across Toni earlier in her “Tomboy Stone” barnstorming days in Minnesota. “Stay in school,” Downs told her. Toni remembered Downs told her to contact him once she had more years under her belt.42 Now, thinking about the scrappy Creoles second baseman and the impact Aaron’s departure would have on their gate receipts, the men couldn’t help but think Toni Stone might fit their needs. In physical size she almost was identical to Aaron. She was an inch taller and two pounds lighter. She was quick on the base paths like Henry and could run the one-hundred-yard dash in eleven seconds.* “She could run like a deer,” an observer said.43 In the field, Toni turned efficient double plays and stood firm against hard-charging base runners. She didn’t have Aaron’s bat—few players did—but she had wrists and arms that reminded Pollock of Willie Mays and Aaron. A smaller player had as much power as a big one, if she used timing, coordination, and reflexes. Back home in Saint Paul, one of Toni’s friends remembered how strong she was. During friendly arm-wrestling matches with Tomboy, he was astonished by her taut arms and wrists—not an ounce of fat on them—all tendons and muscles. As hard and unmovable as “a cold rake,” he said.44 Besides her strength and athletic ability, Syd Pollock simply liked Toni Stone. She was sassy, he said.

  The offer came to Toni when she was in Oakland. She accepted Syd Pollock’s offer to play second base for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro League and would report to spring training in Norfolk, Virginia, in early April 1953. Aurelious Alberga may have had second thoughts about his wife returning to baseball or being used as a gate attraction, but it did not seem to matter. “He would have stopped me if he could have,” Toni said, but he couldn’t.45

  *Toni Stone’s age continued to be a slippery issue even when it came to her marriage license. The December 20, 1950, license lists her age as thirty, even though she would not turn thirty until seven months later on July 17, 1951 (Stone-Alberga marriage license no. 1443, book 975, page 165, San Francisco, CA).

  *The All-American Girls Baseball League (AAGBL), which later became known as the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), existed between 1943 and 1954. The league received attention in the motion picture A League of Their Own. Originally established as a professional softball league, the AAGBL gradually shifted to baseball with a smaller ball, nine players instead of ten, overhand pitching, and other modifications. Players received between fifty and a hundred dollars a week and had to attend charm school so that fans would not view them as too masculine. Athletes also had to wear skirted uniforms, which caused scrapes and bruises when players attempted to slide or field difficult ground balls.

  *One scene in A League of Their Own conveys that some black women wanted to play in the AAGBL. In the scene, the Rockford Peaches team is warming up and catcher Dottie Hinson, the character played by Geena Davis, lets a ball get by her where it rolls toward a group of nearby fans. A black woman picks up the ball and eyes Davis as if to say, “May I join you?” She then fires the ball back to Davis to show she has the ability to compete. While there is no evidence that Toni Stone ever interacted with players on the Rockford Peaches exactly as the film suggests, the scene makes the point that segregation denied African American women athletes an opportunity to play professional baseball with the league.

  †Outside the United States, Pearl Barnett played for the Havanna [Cuba] Stars in 1917. An African American woman, Barnett played first base.

  *Marilyn Cohen writes that Baxter’s play was limited to a few innings in a single game (No Women in the Clubhouse: The Exclusion of Women from Baseball, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009, 77).

  †Jonathan Eig in his excellent account of Jackie Robinson’s first season, Opening Day, recounts the story of Bob Cooke, a sportswriter for the Herald Tribune, who concurred with an anthropologist who argued that blacks had longer heel bones, which gave them greater speed. “It starts with Robinson but it doesn’t end with Robinson,” Cooke said in a story told by writer Roger Kahn. “Negroes are going to run the white people out of baseball. They’re going to take over our game” (Opening Day, 67).

  * To many white fans, all black baseball players were Jackie Robinson. On his first airplane trip to join the New York Giants, Willie Mays placed his glove and cap on an empty seat next to him. “Are you Jackie Robinson?” the white flight attendant asked (Willie Mays with Lou Sahadi, Say Hey: The Autobiography of Willie Mays, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988, 63).

  *The International League was formed in 1884 and 1885 when three baseball leagues merged: the Eastern, the New York State, and the Ontario leagues. The International League reorganized many times in its history. The current AAA International League is a descendent of the earlier franchise. Current teams in the IA include the Pawtucket Red Sox, the Rochester Red Wings, and the Toledo Mud Hens. Jackie Robinson was the first African American to integrate the International League when he played for the Montreal Royals in 1946 before joining the Brooklyn Dodgers the following year.

  †There are many histories of the Negro Leagues that offer thorough accounts of the leagues’ fascinating past. Robert Peterson’s Only the Ball Was White: The History of Legendary Black Players and the All-Black Professional Teams (1992) is widely considered the groundbreaking study that launched a resurgence of interest in the Negro Leagues. Other commendable accounts include Leslie Heaphy’s The Negro Leagues: 1869–1960 (2002) and Neil Lanctot’s Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution (2004).

  *Pitcher Wilmer Fields claimed the Homestead area was so choked with industrial pollution that “all the houses were black or brown from smoke…. I could walk down the hill to eat breakfast and have to change my shirt within two hours because of the smoke” (Wilmer Fields, My Life in the Negro Leagues: An Autobiography of Wilmer Fields, Westport: CT: Meckler, 1992, 13).

  *Use of the plural phrase “Negro Leagues” usually refers to the time prior to 1948 when both the Negro American League and the Negro National League were in existence. The singular “Negro League” marks the time after 1948 when only one league operated.

  †The Clowns were from Indianapolis in name only. In 1950, the team did not play a single home game in Indianapolis. Syd Pollock moved the squad’s home field to Buffalo, New York, for the 1951 season. “Buffalo is a great sports city,” Pollock said. “It will provide substantial box office support for the Clowns” (Louisiana Weekly, May 12, 195
1).

  ‡Effa Manley (1900–1981) was co-owner of the Newark Eagles from 1935 to 1948, after her husband, Abe Manley, bought the team. She played an active role in the team’s management, from scheduling to payroll to equipment acquisition to negotiating player contracts. She was especially adept at marketing and promotions, often connecting Eagles games to civil rights activism. For example, in 1939 at Ruppert Stadium in Newark, she organized an Anti-Lynching Day. Manley was active in civil rights outside of baseball, serving as an officer of the Newark NAACP and organizing a boycott of a Harlem store that refused to hire black clerks. A daughter of white parents, Manley was raised by her mother and her black stepfather and identified herself as a light-skinned black woman. Her most notable achievement in baseball was demanding that the major leagues offer legitimate compensation for Negro League players’ contracts. Among her Eagles players who went to the major leagues were Larry Doby, Monte Irvin, and Don Newcombe. She remains the only woman ever elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. She was inducted posthumously in 2006. Her gravestone reads “She Loved Baseball.”

  *Toni Stone’s time in the hundred-yard dash was exceptional for a woman in the 1950s, according to Christina Lee, Mount Holyoke College cross country, track, and field coach. The hundred-meter dash is now the official recorded distance for track and field events, replacing the obsolete hundred-yard dash. Florence Griffin Joyner holds the women’s world record in the hundred-meter dash at 10.49 seconds. One hundred meters is slightly longer than one hundred yards: one hundred meters equals 109.36 yards (e-mail to author from Christina Lee, October 8, 2008).