This obituary was originally published on Nov. 10, 1996. It is being republished for a package for Women’s History Month.
Toni Stone, a scrappy second baseman who became a footnote to baseball history in 1953 as a member of the Negro League’s Indianapolis Clowns when she became the first woman to play as a regular on a big-league professional team, died on Nov. 2 at a nursing home in Alameda, Calif. She was 75 and had lived in Oakland, Calif., for many years.
The cause was heart failure, a friend said.
She was, by her own account, a tomboy who grew up to be a “big, sassy girl.” When Syd Pollock, the Clowns’ owner (and a sometime business partner of Abe Saperstein, the owner of the clowning Harlem Globetrotters), decided he needed a woman on the Clowns to help attract fans, it was hardly surprising that he chose the 5-foot-7 ½-inch, 148-pound St. Paul native who had been playing baseball with the boys since she was a girl and with the men ever since.
Indeed, although she was listed as 22 when she signed with the Clowns, Marcenia Lyle Stone was 32 and had been playing minor league ball with men for years, at first with the barnstorming San Francisco Sea Lions and later with the New Orleans Creoles.
She began playing on the sandlots of St. Paul, becoming so proficient that Gabby Street, a former major league catcher and St. Louis Cardinals manager who was managing a minor league team in St. Paul, bought her a pair of spikes and let her attend his baseball camp.
After playing with semipro teams in St. Paul, Stone went to stay with a sister in San Francisco, married a man 40 years her senior and continued to play baseball, adopting the name Toni.
Although she did well in the minors, she would never have made the higher level if Jackie Robinson had not broken the color barrier in 1947. Six years later, the Negro leagues were in serious decline.
What may have prompted Pollock to look for a novelty in 1953 was that just the year before, the Boston Braves had snatched away a teenage prospect named Hank Aaron. Stone was glad to oblige Pollock — up to a point. No, she told the owner, she would not play in a skirt, or in shorts, for that matter.
What she would do was play baseball, one season with the Clowns and another with the Kansas City Monarchs.
Although she played mostly in exhibition games and rarely more than a few innings a game in league play, Stone maintained a .243 batting average and was so tough in the field that to the end of her days she would show off the scars on her left wrist and recall the time she had been spiked by a runner trying to bull past a woman who would not budge.
“He was out,” she said.
She may have been hired as a novelty, but Stone’s historic career was enough to earn her induction into the Women’s Sports Foundation’s International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1985.
And she had her moments, none more memorable than the exhibition game in Omaha on Easter Sunday in 1953, when the opposing pitcher strolled through the Clowns’ locker room mockingly asking the players how they would like him to pitch to them, slow, medium or fast.
“Any way you like,” Stone told him after she had dressed in the umpire’s locker room. “Just don’t hit me.”
It was, as she never tired of recalling, a fastball he delivered that she hit over the pitcher’s head into center field. She was so excited she could barely make it to first base. No wonder.
The pitcher was Satchel Paige and hers was the only hit off him that day.
The woman who broke the sex barrier in baseball played in men’s amateur leagues until she was 60. Satchel Paige would have approved.
She leaves no immediate survivors.
To preserve archival articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
The post From 1996: Toni Stone, 75, First Woman to Play Big-League Baseball appeared first on New York Times.
