The team has the distinction of having a girl pitcher on its roster
Once you let the guys know that there isn’t going to be any monkey business, they soon give you their respect
The shortstop didn’t last long. Three months later, a Boston team bought out his contract. He nearly ended up in New York, playing alongside Willie Mayes, but the telegrammed offer of an additional $50 was enough motivation for Hank Aaron to settle on the Braves. It wasn’t an inconsequential sum, coming off a $200 monthly salary.
Five years prior, the Dodgers had become the first MLB team to integrate, calling up Jackie Robinson at the beginning of the 1947 season. But the broken color barrier hadn’t unleashed a torrent. It would be another dozen years before Boston’s other major league team, the Red Sox, would finally call up its first black player — the last team in the majors to do so.
While truncated, Aaron’s time in the Negro American League clearly left a mark on the future Hall of Famer. Years later, he recalled an incident waiting for the rain to clear on a doubleheader. The team found a restaurant near the Washington Grays’ home at Washington, D.C.’s Griffith Stadium. Soon after the meal, the players were startled by the sound of shattering dish ware.
"Even as a kid, the irony of it hit me,” said Aaron. “Here we were in the capital in the land of freedom and equality, and they had to destroy the plates that had touched the forks that had been in the mouths of black men. If dogs had eaten off those plates, they'd have washed them."
Aaron played the entirety of his Negro League career with the Clowns. For the duration of its three decades, the (largely) Indianapolis-based team live up to its name. While remaining competitive (even winning a championship two years prior to Aaron’s signing), it grew into a kind of baseball analog to the Harlem Globetrotters – even sharing a teammate with the long-running exhibition basketball team.
Decades after the Negro Leagues had otherwise disbanded, the Clowns stayed together, playing national barnstorming games until the end of the 1980s. By the end, however, the team’s competitive nature largely took a backseat to comic relief, with players wearing massively oversized gloves and pitching backward, between their legs.
As for the seemingly impossible task of replacing one of the all-time greats, the Clowns settled on a 32-year-old player from St. Paul who Aaron deemed, “a very good player.” In 1953, Marcenia “Toni” Stone became the first woman to play in the Negro Leagues.
An athlete gifted in virtually every sport she touched, Stone’s true love was baseball. Her high school softball career was short-lived, later explaining that the game wasn’t “fast enough.” And while she excelled at figure skating after her mother attempted to push her into a more “ladylike” sport, she invariably returned to the diamond – often skipping class to play the sport.
Stone eventually dropped out of high school altogether to pursue baseball full-time. At 16, she joined the barnstorming Twin City Colored Giants as a pitcher.
“The team has the distinction of having a girl pitcher on its roster,” The Minneapolis Spokesman wrote in 1937. “No other team in the Northwest can boast the same. Miss Marcenia Stone, 16-year-old girl athlete, has been doing much to amuse the fans with her great catch[ing] and wonder hitting power.”
The paper went on to predict great things for Stone. Records of the next decade of Stone’s life are fairly incomplete, however, largely playing for amateur teams after relocating to San Francisco to live near her sister. In 1949, she landed a spot on the San Francisco Sea Lions, a short-lived team in the West Coast Negro Baseball League, which by then had also turned to barnstorming following the league’s implosion.
Her time with the team was also short-lived, in spite of getting two hits in her spring debut. Frustrated with the wage discrepancy with her male teammates, Stone jumped ship for New Orleans Creoles. Three years later, the Clowns came calling.
“While everybody thought that Toni’s signing with the Clowns early this year was just one of those ticket-selling dodges,” The News Journal wrote that June, “she’s been on second base ever since and the club hasn’t suffered.”
The Wilmington paper reported the apocryphal claim that the Indianapolis team was paying Stone $12,000 a year – more than doubling Jackie Robinson’s initial salary for the Dodgers. Also likely exaggerated is the report that Stone got a hit off Satchel Paige – arguably the greatest pitcher to play the game. What is certain, however, is that Stone did well in her single season with the Clowns. She played 50 games for the team in 1953 -- nearly double that of Aaron – hitting .243.
“At first, the fellows made passes at me, but my situation in traveling around the country with a busload of guys isn’t any different from that of the girl singers who travel with jazz bands,” Stone told Ebony. “Once you let the guys know that there isn’t going to be any monkey business, they soon give you their respect.”
Stone played one more season of baseball – this time for the Kansas City Monarchs. Her playing time severely limited, she chose to end her career as the season wrapped.
That same year, the Clowns signed two more female players to replace her. Connie Morgan stepped into the open spot at second, hitting .300 and playing great defense in 49 games for the team, before retiring at the end of the year to finish business school.
The Clowns’ other signing, Mamie Johnson, became the first female pitcher in league history. Playing two seasons, she boasted a 33–8 win-loss record, before retiring at age 19 to pursue nursing. Monarchs’ third baseman Hank Baylis gave her the lasting nickname “Peanut,” by heckling her small stature while facing her in the batter’s box.
"Why, that little girl's no bigger than a peanut,” he said, after the first strike. “I ain't afraid of her.”
Johnson struck him out.
Sources:
Toni Stone https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/toni-stone/
Connie Morgan https://www.ebbets.com/blogs/news-and-history/connie-morgan
Toni Stone and the Clowns on Way https://www.newspapers.com/clip/15189267/the-news-journal/
Toni Stone https://www.mlb.com/history/negro-leagues/players/toni-stone