Summer reading: No clowing here -- Toni Stone could play

Harkening back to last April and the 30 baseball book reviews in 30 days (linked here), more light to heavyweight reading before the summer gloom burns off:

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

The pitch:

Marcenia Lyle "Toni" Stone of St. Paul, Minn., once said: "When you finish high school, they tell a boy to go out and see the world. What do they tell a girl? They tell her to go next door and marry the boy that their family's picked out. ... A woman has her dreams, too."

Author Martha Ackmann found that quote in a story that Merlene Davis wrote for the Lexington Herald-Leader in 1996, in a story headlined: "Female Baseball Player Got the Ball Rolling."

When Toni Stone's brother, Quinten, started to show talent in sports, she told him to stay out of her world: "You get our own dreams, because I've got mine."

Ackmann located that quote from Stone from an interview she did in 1996 with the Baseball Hall of Fame.

A local newspaper said Stone excelled in baseball, basketball, golf, hockey, ice skating, swimming, tennis and track. And then added: "Miss Stone" is "always taking away honors."

If the Negro Leagues needed its own Jackie Robinson, it was Toni Stone -- banned from playing in the All American Girls Baseball League because of her skin color. Instead, she did better.

The first women to play professional baseball when she was signed by the Negro League's Indianapolis Clowns in 1949, she replaced the Clowns' second baseman who had just been signed by the Boston Braves. A kid named Hank Aaron.

She also played for the 1954 Kansas City Monarchs, at age 33, but at that point, the Negro Leagues were thankfully coming to an end, thanks to Robinson's ability to break the major league baseball color barrier seven years earlier.

On Aug. 28, 1954, a columnist for the black Chicago Defender wrote under the headline "Toss 'Em Out" about Stone's career in particular, and women playing pro baseball in general: "Girls should be run out of men's baseball on a softly padded rail. When Miss Stone, who appears to be a woman of unusual athletic ability, was signed last year, the report was ... that she had earned her chance with three years of professional competition (in the equalivant of the Negro minor leagues). ... When the time comes that a woman's affections depend on her batting average, the world will be a sorry place in which to live. It's thrilling to have a woman in one's arms, and a man has a right to promise the world to his beloved -- just so long as that world doesn't include the right to play baseball with men."

With the Negro Leagues going away, and Toni Stone going with it, "without baseball, she lost sight of her dreams and watched from the sidelines as the Negro League community vanished," wrote Ackmann. She added that aside from a brief moment in the 1970s when the San Francisco Giants asked her to throw out the first pitch in a game, "Toni had all but given up being recognized as a former professional baseball player."

Later in life, she got a call from the Hall of Fame, asking her to come to Cooperstown to join in a celbration of the Negro Leagues in 1991. At that point, Ernie Banks, who played against Stone, was quoted as saying she helped him understand more the inequities that women faced.

"She kind of triggered my interest," he said (page 208 of the book). "Young people, especially of all races could learn something from her, from her self-esteem and self-worth. From standing up for what you believed in and dealing with unfairness. ... She was so talented."

According to her biography on the Negro League Baseball Players Association Website (linked here), "Toni Stone maybe one of the best ballplayer you've never heard of."

Hopefully, not any more, thanks to Ackmann's research, well-documented account of what really happened.

How it goes down in the scorebook: A big thank you to Ackmann. Stone died in 1996, at the age of 65. But 14 years later, if feels like she's alive today because of this.