Curveball (21 page)

Toni’s first game would be the beginning of a relentless and grueling schedule. Ahead of Toni were eight months of baseball, from April through the November barnstorming postseason. The team would play nearly every day, including two games on Sundays and occasionally a third in another city. They would travel four hundred miles between games without a stop. “Travel date” was a white term, players said. With Chauff at the wheel, Toni, Bunny, Buster, and the rest of the team boarded Big Red. Syd Pollock stayed at home. Jim Crow laws forbade a white man from riding a bus with Negroes. He would remain in Tarrytown tapping out press releases on his Underwood typewriter.
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Cold rain washed out games in Virginia, and Toni sat on the bench shivering in weather that reporters complained felt more like football season than baseball. Skies cleared as they moved to North Carolina. Syd always made sure the season began and ended in tobacco country where black workers, who were needed to plant and harvest the crop, had money to spend on baseball.
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The crowd in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, was the first to see Toni rip a single and earn her first two RBIs. Two days later, in Windsor, she hit another single, grabbed two more RBIs, and later in another game topped off her North Carolina tour by sneaking behind a runner at second and tagging him in the pickoff.
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But the long bus rides and cold weather may have been to blame when leg cramps forced her to sit out a few contests. She hated the idea of not playing, but found it nearly impossible to run. “Boy, have I had the charley horses,” she said. “Once I hit a two bagger and when I turned first and started for second, my leg knotted up and down I went.”
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By the time the team hit Miami at the end of April for doubleheader play against the Monarchs, Stone was back in the lineup regardless of the strain.
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Haywood admitted that Toni had been hobbled by injuries, but said he was sure that her play had not weakened the team’s infield “one iota.”
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Haywood’s comments may have been Pollock talking, but even Buster could not deny that Toni played with passion. As a catcher, he played with such fierceness that he sustained injuries. When he crouched to receive a pitcher’s throw, Haywood always kept his throwing hand next to his mitt. If he needed to throw the ball to second base in a split second, his throwing hand was right where it needed to be. It was a questionable strategy: all five fingers on his throwing hand had been broken. But playing all out was one of the reasons fans loved the Clowns. No one ever would forget the standing ovation the team once received in Chicago after a particularly vigorous infield practice. As Pollock had predicted, curious fans did come out to see Toni’s fervent play. Crowds filled the small ballparks in Virginia and North Carolina. In the season’s first larger venue in Miami, the local black recreation commissioner called Toni and the Clowns “the best drawing card in Negro baseball.”
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It was still uncertain whether Toni and the Clowns would interest fans in the big industrial cities of the North and the Midwest, but the team would soon find out.

The Miami game also gave the Clowns their first look at the Monarchs’ new shortstop, Ernie “Bingo” Banks. The 1953 season was actually a return to the Monarchs for Banks, who had held a spot on the team before serving for two years in the military. The Monarchs manager, Buck O’Neil, loved Banks’s rangy play that allowed him to go to his left or right, but a scouting report observed a weak throwing arm. He “doesn’t gun it,” the report said.
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On the field, Banks was not flashy in other ways as well. “I want to outsmart the other team,” he said. “I don’t yell at umpires or get into fights.”
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When a later manager tried to get him to “holler more,” Banks said, “I holler. I holler a lot, but I don’t have growl in my voice so nobody hears me.”
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Banks’s subdued behavior on the field also translated into patience at the plate. Rather than the wild swings that Negro Leaguers often used—sometime to dramatic effect—Banks was restrained. “He can wait on a pitch until the catcher’s almost ready to throw it back to you,” one opponent said. Toni respected Ernie Banks. “I liked his ways,” she said, and remarked that he seemed like an old man even though he was young.
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Banks had a wisdom and maturity about him, she observed. Toni would see a lot of Banks during the season and vowed to study his play. He was studying her, too, and noticed the way other players occasionally shunned her. “Human beings are the only ones that can make life complicated and unpleasant,” Banks later said. Toni had her priorities straight, it seemed to him: her actions on the field were more about self-respect than flashy play, he said.
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From Florida, Pollock routed the team through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana for more preseason play. They continued to meet up with Banks and took on the Negro League’s Memphis Red Sox later in the tour. In New Orleans, Toni brought fans to their feet when she singled in a run and later started a double play that squelched a Kansas City rally.
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With every game, the crowds grew larger and Toni attracted more press attention. Even teammates who begrudged a woman on the team acknowledged that Toni could hold her own on the field, increase gate receipts, and keep their salaries from shrinking. “She put fans in the stands,” pitcher Rufus “Zippy” McNeal admitted.
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“I think it brought more women to the game,” Toni said. “Curiosity, if nothing else.” She especially enjoyed when fans stayed after the game and asked to meet her or patted her on the back. The personal connection with fans moved Toni, perhaps because she remembered the ways the Rondo girls once scorned her. “I was so glad they’d touch me,” she said.
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The route Pollock constructed—through Louisiana and the Deep South—was intentional. Not only did Syd suspect that fans who remembered Toni from her Creoles days would turn out to see her, but he also did his best to avoid stops through the Appalachian states. The Clowns hated mountain travel. “Don’t book us through the Smokies this year,” players begged Pollock. “Don’t want to ride those cliffs.”
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As good a driver as Chauff was, the tight curves and sheer drops were dangerous for a large bus traveling late at night on narrow two-lane roads. Chauff was supposed to sleep during games so that he would be ready for a twelve-hour drive after the last out. But Wilson loved dominoes more than sleep, and he often sat high up in the stands during a game, flipping dominoes when he should have been napping.
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To help Chauff navigate the roads and keep him company at night, a player volunteered to ride “milk can.” A metal milk keg was wedged into the top of the stairwell across from the driver. As copilot, “Milk can” was responsible for calling out every road sign, curve, or potential danger to the driver. Players took shifts sitting milk can, although the team clown, King Tut, who knew nearly every road on the tour, was the mainstay.
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No one made jokes about the dangers of travel, even though in all their years on the road the Clowns had only one serious accident. Once, on a rural stretch of Indiana road during the 1947 season, the main fuel tank ran dry. Chauff pulled over to switch on the auxiliary tank. The players set up flares to warn oncoming motorists. The next day’s pitcher was asleep in his assigned spot—the long seat at the rear of the bus. When Bunny looked up to check on Chauff, he saw what looked like a car full of drunks, wildly careening down the road toward them. “Man’s gonna hit us!” Bunny yelled. The car swerved and hit the rear of the bus, sending the pitcher crashing to the floor, where his knees slammed into a metal support post. The bus didn’t fare any better: the crankcase, the motor block, and the storage compartment door were all severely damaged. Pollock was tied up in lawsuits for years.
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Given all the miles they traveled, some veteran players and perhaps even Chauff himself believed it was only a matter of time until a serious accident happened again.

The same day fans were cheering for Toni in New Orleans, national weather forecasters based in Louisiana warned of vicious storms that were lining up in Texas and heading east. The team was heading in that direction, bound for Texas after the game. Later that day, an F5 tornado—the most destructive in Texas history—ripped into Waco, killing 114 and injuring nearly 600. The storm struck the downtown area near the ballpark, flattening buildings but leaving light standards around the field untouched. Over 200 businesses and 150 homes were destroyed, including the town’s large Dr. Pepper bottling plant. The tornado reminded Toni and the Clowns that long jumps in bad weather posed another threat to traveling ball teams. Unlike major league clubs, which traveled by trains or airplanes and whose salaries were not dependent on playing every game, Negro League squads pushed, sometimes carelessly, in order to make it to the next town. “Shuckin’ corn, hoeing taters, picking cotton, ain’t no tougher than this business,” Buster said.
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In its many years as a traveling squad, the Indianapolis Clowns ran up more miles than any other team. They boasted that they had never missed a booking. “Join the Clowns. See the world!” was the team’s ironic motto. Pollock kept track of the miles as well as the dangers and used both as promotional copy in the team’s program book. “The Clowns have traveled 2,110,000 miles. Once played in a town with a population of 476 and had 1,372 fans at the game. Largest crowd 41,127 in Detroit. Smallest 35 in Lubbock, TX during a tornado. Have had the same bus driver for 17 years, worn out three buses and 19 sets of tires.”
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While fans reading the book might have found the statistics amusing, there were others, including Toni, who recognized the dangers. When the Clowns reached Texas a few days after leaving New Orleans, the state was still reeling from the tornado. Seeing the devastation in Waco, no one felt comforted to learn that storm forecasters predicted the summer of 1953 would be a bad one.
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On Friday, May 15, the Clowns kicked off the official start of the Negro American League season in Beaumont. They lost to the Monarchs 4–2, squeezing out only four hits. Toni walked twice and handled every fielding opportunity “without a miss” according to published accounts.
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Ernie Banks received one of the Monarchs’ two errors when he overthrew first base and forced an unearned run.
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But the game in Texas was only a warm-up for what everyone considered the true opening of the season, the home opener against the Monarchs in Kansas City. From Waco, the Monarchs and the Clowns pushed on to Oklahoma, then Kansas, and finally into Missouri for the big game. Toni thought Opening Day festivities for the New Orleans Creoles had been exuberant. She could not imagine what might unfold in Kansas City. The Monarchs’ businessmen watched closely, too. No one knew for certain if crowds would be smaller than last year or if there would be renewed interest in black baseball in this first test of the Midwestern market. The Monarchs hoped that the seventeen-thousand-seat stadium would attract fourteen thousand fans, an improvement over the previous year’s twelve thousand. Everyone watched the gate that Sunday morning.

The first indication of what was in store for Toni and the future of Negro League baseball was the hurried young waitress serving breakfast to
Chicago Defender
sports columnist Russ Cowans. She couldn’t wait for him to gulp down his coffee, pay the bill, and be gone. She had to get to the game. Fans started lining up outside the stadium at 11:00 A.M. for a game that didn’t begin until 2:30. By noon, traffic was snarled and “Sold Out” signs began appearing on makeshift parking lots filled with out-of-state cars. Then the parade began. A police escort wailed its siren as seven hundred people—majorettes, marching bands, politicians, and businesspeople—began the slow route to the stadium. Some of the dignitaries admitted they were sleepy. A celebratory banquet had gone late the night before, saluting old-timers and welcoming Toni and other members of the Monarchs and the Clowns to the 1953 season.

As she always did, Toni basked in the attention. She admitted that sometimes she played the part of a big shot. “I’d get a $20 bill and get it all in ones and have one five that I’d wrap around and it made me look like I had big money,” she laughed.
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Everyone seemed caught up in the spectacle. “The fervor of interest is hard to describe,” one diner said, recalling years past when stars like Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson came to town. Newspapers sensed the same excitement and thought Toni Stone might be a new catalyst. Cowans called her “the greatest star attraction to hit the loop since Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige.” This year would be different, baseball promoters thought. Even the Cincinnati Reds’ general manager, in town to scout major league prospects, agreed. “I believe some Negro League teams quit too soon,” he said.

As the parade entered left center field, the drum major at the head of the line could see that the fans filled the park and overflowed to a grassy slope outside the field. Hundreds more stood on ramps around the stadium or outside, hoping to get in. Families brought picnic baskets and cool thermos jugs for the long afternoon. Syd Pollock had come in from New York for the game and served as catcher for the ceremonial first pitch. But once the teams got down to playing, the game did not go well for the Clowns. The Monarchs scored one run in the first, another in the second, and exploded for five in the third. The Clowns’ pitchers, Percy Smith and Ted Richardson, had difficulty locating their pitches, and by the game’s end the team had managed only three runs on eight hits. Toni Stone did not fare well either. In her first at bat, she fouled off two, then swung wide and missed a curve for a strikeout; her second time up, she hit a grounder to first base for an easy out. She had no chances in the field. The final score was 8–3. It was the Clowns’ sixth straight loss to the Monarchs in league play.