Curveball (16 page)

Toni joined the Creoles just as the team headed out for a two-week barnstorming tour through Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois. As a newcomer, she sat in the worst seat on the bus—in the back, where it was cramped and noisy, straddling a wheel well. Toni respected baseball hierarchies and recognized when to keep to herself. “I knew that there would be times when the guys would want to do things without me; even just to talk about things men had in common. I didn’t think it necessary to change their lifestyles.”
⁶⁵
Even from her spot in the back seat, though, Toni could size her up her teammates. The Creoles were like most semi-pro and Negro League teams. They were a mix of teenage sensations just out of high school and veterans who hoped for a chance to finally make it to the majors. There was eighteen-year-old Buddy Lombard from Algiers, Louisiana, and thirty-nine-year-old Olan “Jelly” Taylor, who had joined the Creoles because he loved the game too much to give it up. Taylor was a former Pittsburgh Crawfords first baseman who had played with Cool Papa Bell and other legendary Negro League players such as Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, and William Julius “Judy” Johnson. Most of the Creoles players were in their twenties and thirties, and many had Negro League experience, such as Frank Evans, an outfielder who had played with the Philadelphia Stars and the Memphis Red Sox; Alfred “Buddy” Armour, an outfielder and shortstop who spent seasons with the Chicago American Giants, the Homestead Grays, and the Cleveland Buckeyes; Charlie Johnson, who played with the Birmingham Black Barons; big Al Pinkston who was a St. Louis Stars first baseman; and Joe Wiley, formerly of the Baltimore Elite Giants and Memphis Red Sox who shared second-base duties with Toni. Freddie Shepard managed the team after three seasons with Birmingham as a pitcher and outfielder.
^*

Although they rarely admitted it, the Creoles players all shared the same worry: would they be noticed? Jelly Taylor worried that scouts would think he was too old. Buddy Lombard worried he was too young. Toni worried that scouts noticed her for the wrong reasons. While she had developed an appetite for being featured on game handbills and in stray sentences of newspaper copy even if reporters consistently got her name wrong, Toni did not want scouts to see her as a sideshow novelty. She wanted to be evaluated for her talent and commitment to the game. Toni hoped her play would attract serious attention from baseball executives like Branch Rickey who might be willing to take a chance on another groundbreaking player. She came to believe that if she were on the right team with the right manager who would give her substantial time on the field, she could prove herself. She had one goal: to become a professional baseball player without being a clown.

The Creoles enjoyed one of their best road trips of the season, with a 44–8 record, before heading home to New Orleans for a July 25 game with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro League. Freddie Shepard knew the matchup would bring crowds and told the press that Toni Stone would be “in good shape for the game” and that he expected her to put on “one of the finest shows of the season.”
⁶⁶
Toni was eager for the contest, since she knew major league scouts and representatives from the Negro League would be in the stands. Russ Cowans of the
Chicago Defender
reported that sixteen major league clubs were “beating the bushes for raw material of the ebony hue.”
⁶⁷
Traveling the South were Eddie Montage of the New York Giants and John Donaldson of the White Sox. Toni’s excitement about the game was shared by Black Barons newcomer eighteen-year-old Willie Mays out of Westfield, Alabama. Like Toni, Willie’s baseball dreams were fueled by growing up near a minor league ballpark. Mays followed the Black Barons, listened to radio broadcasts of the white Barons from Rickwood Field, and became familiar with the booming voice of announcer Eugene “Bull” Conner.
^*
Toni and Willie also respected baseball veterans like Gabby Street and Pepper Batson, the former Rocking Chair catcher for the Clowns who was playing with the Black Barons. Mays thought Batson was not adequately recognized for his powerful throws to second; fans and scouts missed the exceptional skill of many clowning ballplayers, he said. Toni would have welcomed the attention Mays received from the Black Barons manager, Lorenzo “Piper” Davis. While both Stone and Mays initially had trouble hitting curveballs, Mays’s batting average moved from .262 to .311 after Davis told the youngster to use his wrists and a lighter bat.

Toni’s Creoles batting average hovered around .265.
⁶⁸
With her playing time limited to a few innings a game and little attention from her manager, Toni had to rely on her own natural talent, observation, and advice from teammates to improve her game. Sometimes late at night when she sat around with other players “lallygagging and playing cards,” she’d ask the men to help her dissect the game. “I had some buddies who would tell me things,” she said.
⁶⁹
Many players, like Toni, were eager for instruction, but few received coaching. Mahlon Duckett, who played for the Negro League’s Philadelphia Stars, said there were simply no coaches on black teams. One man ran the squad, he said—the manager. “We had no one to teach us,” he said.
⁷⁰
The Creole–Black Barons game in New Orleans was not a showcase for either Mays or Toni Stone. The Black Barons won 4–0 in a pitchers’ duel.
⁷¹
After another road trip for Toni through the Dakotas and western Canada, the 1949 season came to an end with the Creoles finishing in first place.
⁷²
The Greenville (Mississippi)
Democrat-Times
reported that Toni finished the season with a .326 average and played in seventy-eight games.
⁷³

Toni returned to Oakland at the end of the season. She picked up day work where she could—cleaning, carpentry, odd jobs. She was never interested in more permanent work. She’d rather stop into barbershops and ask owners if they needed help cleaning windows or sorting stock. She also sought work driving trucks or other people’s cars. “Need help dumping your truck?” Toni would offer. “Want your car driven down the coast?” Dressed as she was in men’s clothes, Toni made some people apprehensive, but her friendliness and open manner usually eased their suspicion. Toni was especially comfortable working with older people, older men in particular.
⁷⁴
During the off-season, Toni earned enough money to maintain her independence and self-respect. Lessons in self-reliance taught by Boykin and Willa Stone were well learned. “Learn to do hair or sweep a floor,” her parents preached. “You always need something to sustain you.”
⁷⁵
During the off-season, Toni wasn’t looking for a long-term job as much as steady cash to pay basic expenses. The winter, after all, was merely a yawn between the postseason and spring training. By the following April, Toni was eager for another year with the Creoles, and she began playing pickup baseball games in Golden Gate Park. In New Orleans, sportswriter Jim Hall announced that Toni would be joining the team soon, noting that she had “received a leave of absence from a west coast college where she is a PE major.”
^*

A month later, in Saint Paul, Boykin Stone picked up the
Chicago Defender
and was astonished to find his daughter’s photograph and a three-column headline stretched across page eighteen: “New Orleans’ Lady Second Sacker Is Sensation of Southern League.” Boykin and Willa were surprised that Toni Stone, the family’s “special child,” had received national recognition. Toni had started the 1950 baseball season well, and the press, if not scouts and club managers, was beginning to take note. The article described Toni’s unprecedented rise in baseball and declared that she was “now displaying her greatest power with the Creoles.” She was batting nearly .300, flawlessly fielded hardhitting grounders and line drives, and displayed “a technique on second that rivals many of the males” on double plays. The article also reported that Toni had played last year in the postseason against the Jackie Robinson All-Stars in New Orleans before seventeen thousand fans. Described as a “shapely lass,” Toni told reporters that she was “too busy right now for much romancing.” Apparently Toni had mastered the curveball—in handling pitchers and an inquisitive press. She even managed to keep the fib going about her age. The
Defender
unknowingly perpetuated the myth that Toni was born in 1931, not 1921. Readers thought she was eighteen years old, the same age as Willie Mays. Perhaps only Toni’s family and a few close readers of the
Defender
caught an inconsistency in the newspaper’s text. How could a young woman purportedly born in 1931 have attended Gabby Street’s baseball school in 1934?
⁷⁶

Toni was guarded about her age for a reason. Younger players were the ones making moves. Since the previous year when the Creoles met the Black Barons, Willie Mays had pumped up his batting average to .353 and signed with the New York Giants. A nineteen-year-old, Ernie Banks, who had barnstormed with the semi-pro Amarillo Colts during summers in high school had been signed by the Kansas City Monarchs. Even some black players who had made it to the big leagues regretted that their break came too late, when their skills were beginning to wane. Monte Irvin admitted he was not “half the ball-player” he’d been ten years earlier when he played for the Negro League’s Newark Eagles. “I’m not bragging about what I was or trying to knock myself down about what I am now,” he explained. “But between the time I was 19 and 23, I could hit a ball farther and run faster and throw harder and had better reflexes.” In his thirties, Irvin regretted that the major leagues had passed him by when he was a younger man. “How I wish I could have had my chance in the majors at 23!” he said.
⁷⁷
Pushing thirty herself, Toni knew she had a limited amount of time for advancing in baseball, but she also believed there were more opportunities now than there had been when segregation had a full grip on the sport.

Toni found herself at a crossroads about her future. During a series in Memphis that spring, she took stock of her options and herself. She had been playing baseball for over a decade: local teams, American Legion, barnstorming, and now semi-pro ball. Where could she go from here? The call from the Pacific Coast League that she hoped would come never materialized. No woman would ever break the gender barrier in the PCL, as Toni had hoped. She could, of course, stay with the Creoles and barnstorm in the postseason. She could quit baseball, as so many players already had, and look for permanent work in New Orleans or back in the Bay Area. She could return to Saint Paul and join her brother in her parents’ barber and beauty shop business. Or she could redouble her efforts and aim—like Willie Mays—for the major leagues. It didn’t daunt her that she was a twenty-nine-year-old black 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.
⁷⁸
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.

Toni’s Memphis decision sparked personal results. By midseason, she had raised her batting average to nearly .300.
⁷⁹
Injuries, including a bruised left arm from being hit by a pitch, kept her out of several games on a Midwestern tour. On another jump—she couldn’t remember where—an injury sent her to a local charity hospital, the Sisters of the Poor. But after a quick “patch up,” she “rode back to the ballpark on a policeman’s horse,” Toni said.
⁸⁰
It was not surprising that her grit and determination impressed sportswriters.
⁸¹
One night in Iowa was particularly memorable. Creole third baseman Ralph “Big Cat” Johnson grabbed a hot line drive and fired it to Toni for the start of a double play. The lights on the field were dim, and gloves were not made well back then, Johnson said. So when Toni caught the ball, it tore through her glove and knocked her out cold. Toni lay on the ground unconscious as players yelled for water. “They poured water on that girl,” Johnson said, and “she jumped up,” yelling, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” No one had seen anything like it.
⁸²
Women, especially, found her play inspiring. In Mississippi, a 102-year-old woman attending her first baseball game asked to shake Toni’s hand and announced she was “pleased to see a woman playing.”
⁸³
The two women kept in touch, Toni said.
⁸⁴
In Council Bluffs, Iowa, a former women’s softball player emboldened by Toni’s play approached the local men’s team’s manager and won a tryout.
⁸⁵
For Toni, however, no attention meant more to her than the fan who sought her out during a July game in Iowa. Joe Louis, who recently had cancelled an exhibition boxing match in Georgia when local authorities refused to let blacks sit in ringside seats, was in the area participating in a golf tournament. After Toni led off the game with a single, Louis strolled over to the Creoles dugout to congratulate her.

Meeting Joe Louis may have made it seem to Toni that the vow she made in Memphis—as improbable as it was—was within reach. Just like the outstretched hand of her hero, a man she called “the champion of champions,” Toni’s dream felt within her grasp. Becoming the first woman to play professional baseball surely was a preposterous thought. Improbable. Naive. Some would say foolish. But Toni found it impossible to conform to someone else’s notion of who she should be. “My mother had a dreamer in the bunch and that was me,” she said.
⁸⁶
Every night she pictured herself playing professional ball. “I imagined myself on the way to something real big with a big payoff.”
⁸⁷
As enormous as the odds against her were, Toni knew no other choice would be right. Nothing else felt authentic. “I had to play,” she said simply.
⁸⁸
“I wanted to find the heart of the game.”
⁸⁹