Curveball (31 page)

In delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court on the
Brown
decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that segregation’s “impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group.” Although she was able to attend public school in Saint Paul, Toni still encountered the seep of bigotry in countless ways, and legally sanctioned racism made her feel embittered at times. She admitted that she found it difficult to sing the national anthem and acknowledge the flag. To her, the rituals represented the disjuncture between the ideals of democracy and the U.S. government itself. While Toni always voted and in fact called casting her first ballot “one of the most beautiful things in the world to me,” she found the flag and the national anthem insincere representations of an incomplete promise, and the hypocrisy of the act infuriated her. “The blacks were always looked down upon and [the government] looked upon us as second-class citizens,” she said. Politicians, “the high and mighty, would fly the flag and sing ‘God Bless America,’” but the words meant nothing. “Shit!” she scoffed.
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Without the full reality of equality, displays of patriotism were empty gestures to her.

Toni also was quick to point out that the Supreme Court lagged behind professional baseball, and the
Brown
ruling was just catching up when it came to ending segregation. Seven years before the court’s ruling, Jackie Robinson integrated the Dodgers. Many felt Jackie had a greater impact than all the politicians on Capitol Hill. “Baseball has done more to move America in the right direction than all the professional patriots with all their cheap words,” Monte Irvin of the New York Giants said.
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But just as the wheels of the courts moved slowly, so too did progress in baseball. Many fans naively assumed that, once Robinson integrated baseball, the floodgates would open. But in 1954 there were only thirty-seven blacks among nearly four hundred players in the major leagues. The floodgates had produced only a trickle. The week that the Supreme Court handed down the
Brown
decision, four teams—the Phillies, the Red Sox, the Tigers, and the Yankees—had yet to sign even one black player.

The pressure on black players to represent the race had not vanished either. Toni’s friend Ernie Banks almost cracked from the stress when he joined the Cubs.
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Bandleader Lionel Hampton and singer Pearl Bailey used to remind Banks that they were watching his behavior. They would pull him aside and say, “Hey, young man … you’re playing for a whole lot of people, you gotta be the best. And we’re gonna check on you to make sure you do not get into trouble.” At times Banks had second thoughts about playing under such stress. He’d say to himself, “I don’t want to do this. I really want to quit. God! This is too much.” But then he’d think about the sacrifices Robinson had made. Jackie’s “urgency for progress” inspired him to dig in and play to the best of his abilities. Robinson’s insistence, Banks said, “drifted into my life. It drifted into Henry’s” [Aaron’s], too. As odd as it may have seemed to others who watched him integrate the Chicago team, Ernie Banks came to regret that he was not more involved with mounting challenges to racism. Banks sometimes felt as though he were standing on the sidelines, apart from the people who were jailed for protesting unjust laws. “I was playing baseball,” he’d say. “That was the struggle.”
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The rising call for civil rights that Banks heard around him made many supporters of Negro League ball more keenly aware that a segregated league might not survive. Besides the disappointing number of fans at the Kansas City home opener, Toni had other worries as well. Buck added several new players to the roster, including two infielders. The additions were a bad sign to Toni, who was already sharing second base duties with Baylis and Brewer—the latter of whom, like Toni, was over thirty and trying to stay in the lineup. Toni would have to double up now with two more players: an eager eighteen-year-old and a young college graduate. Traveling through Canada playing games against the Clowns, Toni spent more time on the bench than she did in the field. It wasn’t that O’Neil did not respect her. Toni “was a pretty fair player,” he said. “She ran well and knew what she was doing around the bag.” He certainly did not dispute her ability to bring in new fans. “The women really came out to watch,” he said.
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But Buck thought others were better at producing runs and even put himself in the lineup—at age forty-two—before he sent Toni in. During June games, O’Neil inserted himself in the lineup as a substitute for the team’s ailing catcher and even took to the mound once in relief.

When she did get into the game, Toni was cold and batted a miserable .105 during league games. Syd Pollock’s words from the previous year’s game in St. Louis came back to mind. She was trying too hard; her swings were forced and overeager. She also was gaining weight. Toni had packed on twelve pounds above her 135-pound playing weight. She placed herself on a two-week diet, cutting out bread and sweets.
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The more she sat, the more frustrated and restless she became. During off-hours, she was no longer satisfied with watching others play or studying baseball books. “That’s not going to get it,” she fumed—angry at herself as much as she was with others. “You have to execute your ability,” she said.
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It was as though she had lost what once came naturally for her.

By the end of the first half of the season, the Monarchs were in last place, with June’s only bright spot another perfect game. This time a twenty-three-year-old right-hander earned the accolades, blanking the Clowns 6–0 in Cincinnati. “Speedy, young ambitious ball hungry kids” were dominating the team, Buck said.
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Many of the new players were Cuban and had played the year before for the Havana Cuban Giants, a team that served as the Monarchs’ farm team. “They wanted the young ballplayers, especially the Latins to be seen by the major league scouts,” Toni said.
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The standout youngster for the Monarchs was a twenty-year-old first baseman from Havana, Francisco “Pan-cho” Herrera, who was hitting over .300 and knocking 450-foot grand slams. The Clowns also were stocking up on young players and added a seventeen-year-old infielder and an eighteen-year-old pitcher to the team. Outstanding players such as the Clowns’ Ray Neil, who had grabbed the league’s batting title in 1953 and shared second base with Toni, knew they would be overlooked by scouts who considered them too old. The line on Neil was that he “can’t be considered a Big League prospect because he has celebrated at least 30 birthdays.”
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Even Jackie Robinson wondered if 1954 would be his last season. At thirty-five, Jackie was dubbed the “graying old man” by reporters.
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Club owners such as Syd Pollock and Tom Baird almost put a higher priority on signing a young rookie than on winning the Negro League championship. A talented young rookie certainly stood a greater chance of bringing the team financial rewards if he turned out to be major league material. Even convincing a young player to sign was considered a success as some teenage prospects felt they no longer needed to use black ball as a stepping stone to the big leagues. Baird offered a fifteen-year-old sensation out of Omaha a contract with the Monarchs, but the young pitcher turned him down.
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As more black players entered the major leagues, “the Kansas City Monarchs were not the be-all and end-all for a Negro ball player,” Bob Gibson, the Omaha pitching sensation, said.
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But just when Toni despaired at being benched, new opportunity gave her hope. Thanks in part to the excitement she had generated among fans during the last season’s play, Syd and Baird were able to book the big stadiums for July: Connie Mack in Philadelphia and even the colossus of stadiums, Yankee Stadium in New York City. The Monarchs had trudged through so many small towns during the 1954 season: Creston, Iowa; Sikeston, Missouri; Holt, Alabama. Even if Toni had played in more games, few people would have noticed. Back in Norfolk, sports columnist Cal Jacox wrote that “as far as the baseball fan in the Southeast is concerned, the [Negro League] does not exist. Negro baseball has the strange habit of groping in the dark in its relations with the public and this year appears to be no exception.”
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But with the Philadelphia and New York bookings, fans in big cities who had never seen her play finally would get a chance to see “the much publicized infielder Miss Toni Stone.”
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Syd Pollock knew the Philadelphia game would be especially important to Connie Morgan, and he gave her a handful of complimentary tickets to distribute to family and friends in the area. Students from William Penn business school were giddy with excitement and looked for their classmate before the game. They found her in the Clowns dugout out and descended on Connie with warm wishes. Connie said they “spoke to me and hugged me and kissed me and wished me good luck.”
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Weather for the Sunday doubleheader at Yankee Stadium could not have been better. The warm summer day brought peak crowds to area beaches. Both Baird and Pollock had been reporting brisk sales for the game as the announcement had circulated for weeks in black newspapers from the Midwest to the East Coast. But promotional talk of hot-selling tickets did not translate into big gate receipts. Seventy-five hundred fans watched as the Clowns and the Monarchs split the twin bill. While some were surprised that the crowd was as large as it was, attendance did not compare to the number of fans attending the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants games that afternoon. Six times the number of home fans crowded their games to cheer Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, Monte Irvin, and Willie Mays, who was back with the Giants after his stint in the army. If fans cheered Toni at Yankee Stadium and if she did well at the plate, no one knew. Reporters wrote nothing about her play. Connie Morgan and Peanut Johnson received no mention, either. The bench jockeying and Toni’s mounting frustration gnawed at her and affected her play. “I did myself in,” she realized.
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The game Toni hoped would turn things around for her garnered less attention and attracted fewer spectators than the amphitheatre concert of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammer-stein music over at City College. The great black baritone William Warfield “brought down the house as expected,” the
New York Times
reported, with his rendition of “Ol’ Man River.” What made the performance especially memorable, the newspaper said, was its “easy, unforced delivery.”
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For Toni, the rest of the 1954 season was labored. The week after the game in Yankee Stadium, she celebrated her thirty-third birthday. It was not much of a celebration. After the long haul from the East Coast, she was back in Kansas City again for a night game against Buster Haywood and the Memphis Red Sox. Buck gave Toni a rare start and she led off the batting order. But again she could not find her intuitive swing. Toni went 0–2 with a grounder and a strikeout. By cruel contrast, the rest of the team enjoyed a slugfest, and the Monarchs won the game 8–0.
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When she returned to her hotel room later that evening, she tried to console herself by rereading the birthday card Alberga had sent from Oakland. A few days later, in Salina, Kansas, she sat down and wrote her husband. She told him her injured finger was healing, but the hot summer weather was almost unbearable. Recently, she wrote, the team played in 118-degree heat. She avoided telling Pa the worst and did not mention how small irritations were growing larger and engulfing her. Not a word, for example, about the nightly bathroom aggravation. “Two boys would be going in the tub,” she later said, “two a piece.” After their shift, another set would go in. The rotation continued until sometimes as late as midnight with Toni still waiting to get her turn. “When they got through there was no hot water for me,” she said. She tried to talk with Buck about it and asked to be placed on another floor where she would have a better access to the bathroom, but nothing changed. While she knew she had to get along with the team, there were moments when the men’s behavior felt like intentional harassment. “Things could have been a little more comfortable,” she said. “I know when I was goin’ to go into this, it was goin’ to be tough.” But the mounting irritations hurt, she said. The team seemed to “figure any way to keep me miserable.” One old-timer in Peoria, seeking to offer Toni comfort, took her aside and said, “There’s gonna be days when you feel like killing yourself.” The degradation, the frustration, the long, physically exhausting days could bring a player to the breaking point. One afternoon after a warm-up practice when teammates teased her by purposefully hitting balls she couldn’t reach, Toni hit her limit. “I just got real angry,” she said, and after the game she wandered by herself into a liquor store. Toni bought a bottle of Mr. Boston’s—an “old cheap bottle of liquor,” she said—and sat on a curb and drank until she got drunk. She felt that all the years of struggling to play baseball had amounted to nothing. “I could of just died,” she said.
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When voting results came in for the East-West game in August, Toni’s name was not on the roster. The news broke her spirit. For the second year in a row, fans did not choose Toni to be among the Negro League All-Stars. Connie Morgan was not selected either, and Mamie Johnson was no longer in the running. The Clowns released Peanut, the Norfolk (Virginia)
Journal and Guide
reported. “You know I have played hard Poppie to go to the East & West game,” Toni wrote to her husband. “My name was not on the list.” Her disappointment cascaded into disillusionment about her entire career, and she could no longer hide her despair. “My years in Negro baseball [have] not meant anything,” she wrote. “The owner has capitalized me … that’s all.” To Toni, team owners and players seemed interested only in money—“peddling flesh,” she called it.
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They were not focused on improving their abilities or winning championships. The Monarchs had come to conduct themselves less like a team than a collection of independent agents out to get the best deals, she thought. Why would it matter to self-interested players if a team won a championship, Toni asked? They only wanted to move out of the Negro League and on to the majors. “Baseball is a business,” she wrote, “and now I have to capitalize for myself.” Toni told Pa she would look into barnstorming at the end of the season and then added in a small script at the bottom of the page, “Don’t nobody want to win a champ?”
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