Curveball (14 page)

The
Louisiana Weekly
, the city’s black newspaper, had a new editor covering the game. Jim Hall worked as a maintenance man at the newspaper before he started writing sports. He had no sports reporting experience, although he had played basketball at Dillard University.
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Hall wrote, “The highlight of the afternoon was the exhibition put on by San Francisco handless and footless wonder Little Sammie Workman, which was worth the price of admission alone. The little fellow performed feats that were truly amazing and kept the crowd … mystified and almost unbelieving. The applause which followed his act was deafening and fully justified.”
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No doubt Toni was disappointed that Hall did not give more attention to the game. There were no statistics in the article, not even a box score. She received one mention with her nickname, middle, and last name scrambled almost beyond recognition. “Lyle Stone Tony,” Hall wrote, was in the lineup.

Inaccurate, incomplete, or inadequate newspaper coverage was a constant source of frustration for Toni and the other black players. Most black newspapers like the
Louisiana Weekly
were published once a week, and events that happened four or five days before the paper went to press would not be included in the paper. “Why cover a game Sunday if the paper didn’t publish until the following Thursday?” some editors asked.
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The sports department had one or perhaps two employees who covered multiple baseball venues: from Jackie Robinson and the major leagues to Negro League ball; semi-pro and barnstorming teams, local squads, and public school and college teams; and other summer sports such as tennis, boxing, and track. Some sports editors had to divide their time among additional responsibilities as city editors or entertainment reporters. Rarely did Jim Hall have the resources or the space on the
Louisiana Weekly
sports page to include an interview with a player or in-depth coverage of a game. Hall never had the luxury of attending an away game. Edward Harris of the
Philadelphia Tribune
said baseball was the toughest black sport to cover because teams were always traveling. “You’d see [players] occasionally, sit in the bullpen to chat, and the next thing you know, they were off on a bus going somewhere.”
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Most of the time editors relied on club owners to send in their teams’ final scores and highlights. When the scores did come in, they usually were too late for weekly newspapers. Many times an announcement of a game would appear in the
Louisiana Weekly
and no follow-up could be found. Readers who tried to follow the Creoles or the Sea Lions could not be sure of final scores or if games had even been played. To add to the problem, teams frequently forgot, were too busy driving to the next town, or were too strapped for money to mail, phone, or telegraph scores to area newspapers. For barnstorming teams such as Toni’s Sea Lions, the situation was even worse. Games with other traveling squads or local teams were often scheduled at the last moment. Local reporters may not have even noticed that a team was in town if they missed handbills distributed around barbershops or promoters’ phone calls hastily made from corner phone booths. Some players even swore that scores were printed in local newspapers only when club owners paid editors to print them.
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Even teams in the Negro League often failed to keep the press informed. Wendell Smith of the
Pittsburgh Courier
pleaded with Negro League club owners to stay on top of scores. “They must inform [the public] what is happening, where their teams play, supply the papers with the proper standings and weekly results and keep their version of the game on a level of dignity.”
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While many newspapers relied on the Elias Howe News Bureau for statistics, Howe also depended on receiving statistics from club owners. Occasionally the bureau posted incorrect results. Tom Baird, owner of the Kansas City Monarchs, pointed out that “some owners don’t send ’em in only when their teams wins, some just sends ’em in now and then and a lot of times when we pay a sports writer, they don’t send them in.”
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Baird had little recourse since the league did not have any procedures to ensure scores were collected or a way to penalize teams that did not accurately and promptly assemble data. At least one time, Howe’s final standings for the complete Negro League season were inaccurate.
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Statistics were another problem because box scores and players’ batting averages were sent in even less frequently. Often players’ names were misspelled, abbreviated, or otherwise barely recognizable. Occasionally owners asked a relief pitcher to keep the scorebook, but if a starting pitcher got in trouble and a reliever went in, the scorebook sat on the bench unattended.
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Some players became so frustrated that their individual statistics were not kept that they began keeping their own records, including data on strengths and weaknesses of opposing players.
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The problem was compounded, of course, by a white press that rarely covered black baseball teams. Scanning the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
, a newspaper to which white residents subscribed, a reader would hardly know that blacks made up a third of the state’s population. They were all but invisible.
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In addition, many small towns were not large enough to support a black newspaper. Lack of press coverage exasperated Toni, who would play a great game and find no written record of it. The flawed record keeping made it difficult to offer a quantitative argument that she played as well as the men, or that black players were as good as whites. Louisiana sportswriter Russell Stockard realized that the accomplishments of many extraordinary black players were simply lost. “I feel a weakness in my heart for every day they didn’t keep stats,” he said.
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The great Negro League center fielder James “Cool Papa” Bell knew firsthand what Stockard meant. “I remember one game I got five hits and stole five bases,” he recalled, “but none of it was written down because they forgot to bring the scorebook to the game that day.”
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While Jim Hall was not an experienced sportswriter, he was resourceful and learned reporting quickly. Soon he began writing on the political significance of sports, using his column in the
Louisiana Weekly
to lobby on behalf of black athletes. In one column he called on the major leagues to consider squads such as the Sea Lions and Creoles as minor league feeders. A “mixed farm system could materialize in democratic sections of the country. (Remember Truman won the South),” Hall wrote.
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Earlier that month, the Pacific Coast League’s San Francisco Seals added another black player to the league in signing pitcher Percy Fischer. Paul I. Fagan, president of the PCL, was a new and unequivocal voice in support of integration. “Baseball is an American game. Every American should have an opportunity on the basis of his ability alone,” he wrote. “That is our policy and I personally guarantee that this policy will be obeyed. If anybody in my employ does not like this American ideal, he can turn in his contract.”
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Jim Hall chided New Orleans sports promoters—black and white—for being too accepting of the racial divide. “Frankly in New Orleans, the promoters of baseball, basketball, football, along with track, lack the drive to break down the barriers of Jim Crow in sports,” he wrote. “With the exception of boxing (the Louisiana law states there shall be no fistic combat match between any person of the Caucasian ‘white race’ and one of the African or ‘negro’ race and, further, it will not be allowed for them to appear on the same card), there is no reason nor law that calls for segregation in sports except it is the usual custom and practice.” Maintaining the status quo of segregation and relying on the hope that the race might achieve equality “someday” infuriated Hall. “New Orleans as a city should never stand up and proclaim democracy in our way of life as long as ‘custom and practice’ serves as its foundation for everyday living. For New Orleans, ‘Jim Crow sports situation’ is regarded today as one of the South’s worst. This writer asks, ‘New Orleans, what is your next move?”
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Toni might have asked the same question of herself. After leaving New Orleans, the Sea Lions headed north for games in the Midwest. On the bus ride through Arkansas and Missouri, Toni thought about the Creoles and how their team owner, Alan Page, carefully watched her play. Page was responsible for the good will many supporters felt toward the Creoles. “Genial Alan Page,” Jim Hall wrote time and again, as if “genial” were the promoter’s first name. Few baseball owners across the South were more innovative, more successful, or more of a risk taker than Alan Page. He was always “pull[ing] one from his bag of tricks,” observers said, including adding women to the game.

Lucille Bland remembered Alan Page saying, “If I could just find a girl.” Bland was a cashier at the Page Hotel, and her father was a close friend of the promoter’s. Page thought that if he could hire a young woman who knew baseball and was willing to travel with the team as a coach, the novelty would bring curious fans to the game. “He thought that would be the come-on,” Bland said. Page placed an advertisement in the newspaper, stipulating interested candidates had to know baseball and be “full of pep.”
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He couldn’t find a girl who met his criteria until he turned around one day and took a look at Lucille behind the cash register.

Lucille Bland loved sports, played basketball and baseball at Dillard, and read everything she could about her hero, Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Bland joined the Creoles as a third-base coach and sat in the front seat of the bus with her “dresser,” Inez, who made sure Lucille was attired in fashionable wear after the game. Mr. Page insisted she look stylish, Bland said. For two years, Bland traveled from New York to Texas and enjoyed the game’s showmanship. Lucille Bland knew how to entertain. “I’d get right in an umpire’s face and let him have it,” she said. Coaching the players, however, took a while to perfect. “At first they resented it immensely,” she said, but after they saw she understood the game, the men became more open to her suggestions. “I was a sister to them,” she said. An automobile accident in 1948 sidelined Bland, and she resigned her position with the Creoles.
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To fill her spot as the girl attraction, Page found Fabiola Wilson—“comely and dimpled,” his press release said—and “attractive” Gloria Dymond, both recent graduates of a local New Orleans high school. They were billed as “extra outfielders.” Wilson wasn’t an athlete, Bland said. She was the girlfriend of one of the Creole players.
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In Bland’s mind, Page did not regard the women as serious athletes, and Wilson and Dymond were gone in a year. If fans expected entertainment from Toni Stone when she played against the Creoles at Pelican Stadium, they were surprised. She was an exceptional athlete and a woman player Alan Page began to take seriously.

After their games in New Orleans, the Sea Lions headed north for a long and uncomfortable ride to Arkansas. Luggage rattled on top of the bus, and players hoped that a sudden downpour wouldn’t drench their somewhat clean clothes. Players talked, read the sports pages, got on each other’s nerves, or tried to wall off themselves from sensory intrusion, including the stench of sweat-drenched uniforms hanging in the back of the bus. Sometimes players broke up the numbing travel by throwing empty bottles at telephone poles as they passed at fifty-five miles an hour.
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A few players, like Toni, grew restless and searched for a little activity to break the monotony. “Playing the dozens” was a Sea Lions favorite. The dozens was a trash-talking game that tested the participants’ limits. Each player took turns insulting the other, the jabs increasing in flash and barb until one player couldn’t offer a response. Some people called the back-and-forth arguments “yo mamma fights,” and occasionally the game ended with a tussle of fists as tempers flared when the insults cut too close. Somewhere around Kansas City, BeeBop Gordon remembered, Toni and another Creole player, John Scroggins, got into it playing the dozens. Scroggins and Stone went back and forth, back and forth. Toni held her own, quickly slinging insults with more and more flair and wild word play until Scroggins sputtered and stammered and staggered into silence. “She got the better in that ‘discussion,’” BeeBop said.
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Shortly afterward, Stone left the team.
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BeeBop thought Scrog-gins couldn’t stand losing face to a woman. Tensions on the bus became uncomfortable for Toni. But, more important, she found out that she was being paid less than the men on the Sea Lions. When Alan Page offered her a better deal, Toni knew it was time to go. In a matter of weeks, she was back at Pel Stadium in a hand-me-down uniform with CREOLES spelled in blue letters across her chest.
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Toni quit the Sea Lions at the right moment. By the time the San Francisco team wrapped up games in Kansas City and headed to Canada, so many players had jumped to other squads that Yellowhorse Morris was left with only Sammy Workman to entertain fans. Even the white press noted Morris’s headaches. “Harold Morris, owner of the San Francisco Sea Lions, touring Negro baseball team, was a troubled man when he arrived in Regina Saskatchewan today—minus his team,” the
New York Times
reported. “He said his players jumped the club and signed to play with the Buchanan, Sask, All-Stars for the remainder of the season. The only ‘player’ Morris has left is Sammy Workman, an armless and legless performer who has been traveling with the team.” Morris reported that what was left of the Sea Lions team would stay in Canada until the end of August to drum up barnstorming games. He also indicated that former players could be deported to the United States “for jumping their bond.”
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The Sea Lions bus, minus any players to fill it, sat on the Canadian prairie until Morris hired a local to drive it back to California. No player felt too bad for Yellowhorse, though. The Chicago Cubs hired Morris to scout black players on the West Coast.
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