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

by Martha Ackmann

  What Toni did not tell reporters but confessed to her family years later was that those assumptions hurt. But she found a way to take advantage of them. At times hotel proprietors assumed Toni was a prostitute traveling with the men in order to serve their sexual needs. They refused to let her stay and gruffly directed her to the nearest brothel.* Her teammates, Bunny, and Buster either would not or could not successfully defend her. That’s how she discovered the underworld of prostitutes’ hospitality. “They took me in,” Toni said. The “sporting girls” gave her a clean bed to stay in and a meal to eat. Perhaps Toni saw something in the women that reminded her of her own outsider status; perhaps they saw some of the same in Toni’s unconventional life. They liked each other, and when Toni returned the women would have a car waiting for her. They sometimes attended her games, followed her in the sports pages, and encouraged her to take her responsibility to the race seriously. “You got to represent,” they told her.

  Toni developed a network of brothels throughout the South where prostitutes took care of her, sometimes washing her uniform during the night and leaving it folded on the dresser for when Toni awoke the next morning. After Toni complained of the discomfort of taking hard throws to the chest (some intentionally), the women sewed padding into her navy blue Clowns shirt, hoping the extra padding—something sports columnist Sam Lacy never saw—would keep her safe. Some mornings Toni would wake to find a few dollars beside her uniform—extra money to make the two-dollars-a-day meal money she received from the Clowns go further. Those mornings weren’t the first time that Toni had encountered the kindness of prostitutes. Before she turned to the church for help finding a permanent room in San Francisco, she found temporary housing in the attic of a prostitute’s home. “She was a ‘wrong woman,’” Toni said, “but a beautiful human being. She taught me many things … the walks of life. I had no crime with her.”25 Realizing many people thought otherwise, Toni was quick to come to prostitutes’ defense. “They were good girls,” she said. Like other times in her life when Toni expressed respect and even tenderness for social outcasts, she sounded as though she might be seeking respect herself. As confident and driven to play baseball as she appeared to be, Toni could be wounded by incivility and humiliation.26 She heard the jeers: “Why don’t you go home and fix your husband some biscuits!”27 Playing professional baseball might simply be too hard and maybe it wasn’t the right thing for her to do, she sometimes thought.

  But there were other women athletes who admired Toni and were eager to follow in her path-breaking footsteps. Eighteen year-old Mamie Johnson was a pitcher for the semi-pro Alexandria (Virginia) All-Stars and the St. Cyprian’s recreational league in Washington, D.C.* Like Toni, Mamie grew up playing baseball with the boys. As a child in rural Ridgeway, South Carolina, she learned baseball from her uncle and practiced pitching by throwing at crows on a fence. Her ball was a rock wound with twine and sealed with heavy masking tape. She made bats from tree limbs. First base was a pie plate. Second was a broken piece of flowerpot. Third was a tree root near a lilac bush, and home plate was the lid from a five-gallon bucket of King Cane syrup. Mamie lived with her maternal grandmother while her mother, who had once played baseball herself, worked as a dietician in Washington, D.C. Mamie’s father, a construction worker, was not an active presence in her life. When her grandmother died, young Mamie went to live with an aunt and uncle in Long Branch, New Jersey. One day she wandered into a police precinct in New Jersey and asked about playing for the Police Athletic League (PAL) baseball team. The PAL organization in Long Branch had never had a black ballplayer on the team and certainly not a female one, but the lieutenant invited her to try out. Once she started pitching well, the team accepted her. Mamie played with PAL through high school and then moved to D.C. where she lived with her mother. She married and started playing recreational baseball in the lots across from Howard University.28

  Playing baseball was a passion for Mamie—much more than working at an ice cream shop in the District. “The more I played, the better I got and the more I wanted to play,” she said. When her friend Rita Jones—a first baseman for the St. Cyprian’s team—heard on the radio that the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was holding local tryouts, the two young women made plans to attend. After locating the baseball field, they looked around and saw that all the players were white. “You think they’re going to let us try out?” Rita asked. Before they could put on their baseball gloves, AAGPBL players and organizers gave them a stare that communicated everything. “They looked at me like I was crazy,” Mamie said. She and Rita understood immediately that they were not welcome. The experience marked Mamie. “It dawned on me,” she said. “They think we’re not as good as [they] are.”29

  Mamie returned to Washington and continued playing with St. Cyps on Sundays at Banneker Field. One afternoon, Bish Tyson, a sometimes bird dog for the Clowns, watched the five-foot-four-inch teenager pitching. He liked what he saw, but the risks with Mamie were substantial. She had played on local men’s teams, but she lacked high-level playing time and had not been out on the road with a team. Her experience could not be compared with the depth of Toni’s background. Nevertheless, Bish thought Mamie was worth a look and contacted Bunny Downs, telling him he had found a player worth evaluating. Bunny arranged for Mamie to meet the team in a September swing through D.C., take some cuts off Clowns pitchers, and serve up some fastballs to Toni Stone, Gordon “Hoppy” Hopkins, and other Clowns players. After conferring with Syd Pollock and Buster Haywood, Downs offered Mamie a noncommittal postseason spot with the Clowns when they barnstormed for two months in the fall. Within days, the young woman quit her ice cream shop job and was on the Clowns bus bound for Norfolk and barnstorming games against the Negro League All-Stars. “Honestly, to be frank,” Mamie said, “I slipped away.” Her husband did not appear to have a voice in her decision, either. “It didn’t make any difference because I was going to play anyway,” she said.30

  About the same time Mamie joined the Clowns for postseason play, another young woman, inspired by Toni Stone, approached the team. Connie Morgan had read about Toni in Ebony magazine and announced to her grandmother that she was going “to write to Toni Stone and see if I can get on a baseball team.”31 But her grandmother did not take Connie’s ambition seriously and shrugged it off “like a pipe dream,” Connie said. The young woman did write a letter, and Toni passed it on to Bunny Downs. When the Clowns traveled to Baltimore for the start of their postseason barnstorming tour, Syd invited Connie to drive from her home in Philadelphia for a tryout. Connie Morgan was a standout with local softball and basketball teams.

  Like Toni, Connie had honed her athletic skills at community centers. No one really knew where she got her athletic talent. Her parents, Vivian and Howard, were not particularly athletic. Her father was a window washer and her mother worked for the local Sea Farer’s Union.32 The couple had six children: two boys and four girls. The oldest of the siblings, Connie tried to interest one sister in basketball, but the younger girl did not stay with it. When Connie entered Bar-tram High School in Philadelphia, a neighborhood youth worker saw her playing softball and asked if she would be interested in joining a recreational league. Connie joined the Honey Drippers and played with them for nearly five years. A right-handed hitter, she batted around .370 and played every position except pitcher.33 But as the girls on the team neared the end of their high school years, most of them lost interest in softball. The “girls got so they didn’t want to play anymore,” Connie said. None of the girls in her class ever heard of athletic scholarships to college and “no one offered me” one, she said. A good student, Connie enrolled in the William Penn School of Business in Philadelphia after she graduated from high school and took typing and bookkeeping classes to prepare for a career as a secretary. While enrolled at William Penn, Connie read the article about Toni Stone and wrote her letter. Her parents were proud that their daughter had taken a step toward playing black baseball, but were “shocked
,” Connie said, when the Clowns invited her to Baltimore.34

  On October 9, nearly a month after Mamie Johnson joined Toni on the postseason tour, Connie Morgan appeared at the Baltimore stadium for a tryout. Some thought Syd Pollock was just as interested in Connie’s cute appearance as he was in her athletic skills.35 A petite, attractive eighteen-year-old “gal guardian” in the infield would be in marked contrast to Toni with her rough hands, fiery disposition, and bow-legged walk. Syd wanted the newcomer to try out in Clowns flannels and arranged for some photographs to be taken of Connie just to see how she would look as an official team member. Buster Haywood told Connie to take up position at third base and then hit balls to judge her fielding and throws to first base. Haywood and others thought third base “was too hot a corner for me,” Connie said, and Buster put her on second instead. Toni watched from the sidelines, keenly aware that second was her spot in the infield. She felt nervous, even usurped—like some of the old-timers on the Clowns who six months before wondered why Syd had gambled on a woman from the New Orleans Creoles.

  The greatest pressure was on Connie, however. Few players could ever say they had a tryout in front of Jackie Robinson, Luke Easter, Pee Wee Reese, and Gil Hodges. Robinson’s All-Stars had responded to Syd’s earlier invitation and signed to travel throughout the South, playing games against the Clowns, the Negro League All-Stars, and other teams. Robinson and his teammates watched Connie and commented on “her good arm.”36 Bunny Downs, seeing an opportunity to have Connie photographed with Jackie, asked Robie to pose as though he were offering “batting tips” to the young woman. Robinson complied and stood with the teenager, who looked dutiful and stunned next to her hero. Haywood told Connie that Syd Pollock would be in touch with her later. She returned home to Philadelphia in her grandmother’s DeSoto, “surprised that [the Clowns] wanted me.”37

  Nobody took a photo of Jackie Robinson with Toni Stone. Toni thought Syd would have wanted one. He always wanted her to sell photographs of herself in the stands or after games. It was a chore that Toni disliked and one that she felt diminished her stature as a professional baseball player. “I shouldn’t have to do that, you know,” Toni said.38 Then there were problems with Toni’s mail. All of her fan mail and professional inquiries were routed through Pollock’s Tarrytown office. Toni believed letters from other teams—asking if she might be interested in joining them for a higher salary—never found their way to her. “They say, ‘We sent you a letter so and so and so.’ I never got it. I know there were a lot of people wanted me to try to play for them. You know, more opportunities.” Then there were the comments she began to hear from the Clowns management. “Oh, she’s chesty,” Toni said she heard—too full of herself, too ambitious and unyielding. “Things looked like they just got rougher,” she said. 39

  The Clowns and the Jackie Robinson All-Stars continued their play throughout the South, sometimes also playing against Roy Cam-panella’s All-Star team. In Memphis and Birmingham, local Jim Crow ordinances forbade whites and blacks from playing on the same team. Birmingham Sheriff Bull Connor warned that if the Robinson All-Stars fielded a team of whites and blacks, there would be “big trouble.” Many of Jackie’s white major league players stayed away, afraid for their lives. Robinson believed that paying fans were entitled to a game and did not challenge the ordinance. Instead, he supplemented his team with other black players, including Willie Mays. Critics of Robinson said he should have defied Birmingham’s Jim Crow rules and refused to play the game. Later in the season, Robinson rethought his position. He pledged to field another integrated barnstorming team next season and donate his earnings to charity.40

  Debate among those who believed prejudice should be faced down intensified in 1953. When Robinson and the All-Stars pulled into Baton Rouge the evening of October 25, the city was still spinning from the successful bus boycott that summer. Baton Rouge’s city-parish council had voted earlier in the year to raise bus fares, an increase that affected mostly black passengers, who rode the buses more frequently than whites. Reverend T. J. Jemison, the pastor of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, denounced the increase and also called for an end of segregated seating on buses. Although black passengers paid full fare, he said, they were forced to sit in the back or stand while “white” seats up front remained empty. The Baton Rouge Council amended the seating policy to allow blacks to occupy bus seats as long as they didn’t sit in front of or alongside whites. Yet no one enforced the policy, bus drivers threatened to strike, and the Louisiana attorney general stepped in to declare the new seating ordinance unconstitutional since it violated the state’s existing segregation laws. Angered, Reverend Jemison and others formed the United Defense League (UDL) and called for a boycott of the city’s bus system. Thousands of black residents began participating in nightly UDL meetings across Baton Rouge. Five days later, black and white leaders negotiated a compromise allowing bus riders of any race to sit wherever they wanted, except for the first two rows, which were reserved for whites, and the last two rows, for blacks. One young man who took special interest in the successful bus boycott was Martin Luther King Jr., who had recently completed his theology degree at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. Reverend King and his new wife, Coretta, were preparing to take up his new ministry at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

  When the postseason with the Jackie Robinson All-Stars ended, Toni’s husband knew she was upset with the addition of Mamie Johnson, and the prospect of Connie Morgan, on the team. “At the end of your contract you understand you are free to do what you want, though I say look before you leap,” he warned her. Alberga thought that the Clowns might be in a better financial position than other Negro League clubs and encouraged Toni not to make any quick decisions. “Dear, you have shown good judgment in the past and I am sure you can do it again,” he wrote.41 With the season concluded, the Howe News Bureau posted the Negro League’s final results, showing that the Kansas City Monarchs had won both the first and the second half of the 1953 season. The Clowns finished third out of the four teams. Although Buster Haywood feared Toni’s play at second base for the Clowns would affect Ray Neil’s batting average—it did not. Neil won the Negro League batting title, hitting .397. Ernie Banks came in third at .347. In the last days of the season, Banks signed with the Chicago Cubs. The Bureau reported that Toni Stone hit .243 in league play, with seventy-four at bats over fifty league games. “All of her hits were singles, except for one double,” it stated. Toni also stole one base, had three RBIs, and posted a .852 fielding percentage.42 What the Bureau did not record, however, were statistics from the nearly one hundred non-league games and other barnstorming contests that Toni and the Clowns played during the majority of the 1953 season. In some respects the Bureau numbers represented only a portion of any player’s record. Most sportswriters believed a Negro League player’s statistics for the full year—rather than just the league-sanctioned games—were higher than what the Howe News Bureau reported.

  Toni returned to Oakland and her husband for the first time in over eight months. She was exhausted, and Alberga was ill. In January, Syd Pollock wrote with concern for Alberga’s health, adding that he knew Toni regarded her husband as “a guiding light and inspiration in your endeavors and future success.” Syd informed Toni that the Clowns’ contracts for the 1954 season would be mailed out in February and reminded her that the team had a “right to her services” for the upcoming year. He asked that she tell him as soon as possible if she intended to return for the next year.43

  Toni could not make up her mind. She was worried about her husband, ground down by the road, and disturbed about several new developments. The hiring of Mamie Johnson for the barnstorming season made her feel as though the team had less interest in her, the potential of Connie Morgan at second base would reduce her playing time, and the lack of respect that Buster Haywood showed her was apparent not only to Toni but to others as well. Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American reported that “late summer ru
mors said Buster chafed at having to use Toni as box office bait.”44 The 1953 season was the only year Buster ever got angry at his friend Syd Pollock, he said. Haywood complained, “She wasn’t a ballplayer and I’m playing to win.”45 Syd’s January letter temporarily eased Toni’s distress on one score: Buster Haywood would not be managing the Indianapolis Clowns in 1954. The forty-four-year-old Haywood might stay on as a substitute player or the club chauffeur, Syd informed her, but Oscar Charleston—the legendary former Negro League slugger—was taking over the reins. The Monarchs coach, Buck O’Neil, was typical of many ballplayers who thought Charleston was the greatest ballplayer who ever lived. “He was like Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and Tris Speaker rolled into one,” O’Neil said.46 Players also said Charleston was an excellent coach who could teach anyone how to lift his game.

  But Pollock confirmed Toni’s concerns about Mamie Johnson and Connie Morgan. Syd told her he was hiring both young women for the upcoming season and intended to use only one of the women in the lineup at a time. The team couldn’t risk “letting the public down when injury crops up,” he said, “which occurred so many times last season when [we] only had you to fall back on.” Pollock offered Toni $350 a month—down $50 from her 1953 high of $400. He realized the offer was less than she had been making and opened the door for Toni to consider other possibilities. Syd offered to contact Tom Baird, owner of the champion Kansas City Monarchs. Baird and O’Neil had agreed that the only woman they would consider was Toni Stone. They offered to sign her for $325 a month. Neither Pollock’s offer nor the possibility of going with Kansas City for even less money was a choice that pleased Toni, and she did not immediately reply to Pollock’s letter.47