Curveball (32 page)
Authors: Martha Ackmann
The rest of the Monarchs began to feel the weariness of the road as well. In a game against the Clowns in Joplin, Missouri, the teams committed eleven errors before a meager crowd of fourteen hundred fans. Players looked “lackadaisical” and “worn out,” the
Kansas City Call
reported. Later, in a game with Detroit, a reporter observed that “both teams displayed a half-heartedness in the field that left several fans wondering.” During a rainout in Kansas City, even the groundskeepers were so exhausted that they “abandoned their job in the downpour” and left the field looking like a lake.
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Fatigue spilled over into spite as well. Buster Haywood was so fed up with an erratic pitcher he gave the youngster a handful of bills at a rest stop, instructed him to buy the team sandwiches, and then drove off without him.
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In locker rooms before a game, Buck O’Neil could hear opposing players sharpening their steel cleats in hopes an aggressive slide would slice a Monarch guarding the bag. “Hey, Buck,” they would yell between locker room walls. “Hear that?”
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Umpire Motley knew players also placed rocks in their gloves for aggressive tags. They would smash loaded gloves across the face of an opposing runner, hoping to stun or disorient him, he said.
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Motley even saw spite turn to violence one night on the Monarchs bus when Hank Baylis came charging after him with a knife after what the infielder thought had been a bad call during the evening’s game.
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Then there was the incident with Toni at home plate. Always intense when she was at bat, Toni flew into a rage when she was called out on a pitch that she believed was a ball. She jumped on the catcher’s back and the crowd went wild with delight. Everyone in the stands thought Toni’s explosion was trumped up and part of the show, as amusing as King Tut’s clowning. What they didn’t know was what the catcher said as the ball flew over the plate. “Pussy high,” he yelled as the ump called her out. Days later, Toni did not know what angered her most: the wrong call, the catcher’s demeaning attempt at a joke, or the pleasure Buck O’Neil seemed to get in telling the story over and over again.
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On Saturday, August 28, Doc Young, a columnist for the
Chicago Defender
, delivered the season’s final word on women in baseball. “Toss ’Em Out,” the headline read in a stinging indictment of Toni’s entire career. “Girls should be run out of men’s baseball on a softly padded rail,” Young wrote. “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.” But she was a joke, Young said. Her presence threatened men’s morale and made them feel “pretty silly.” Men who praised her tenacity were disingenuous, he said, and only looking out for their own jobs. If a girl is athletic, let her play a feminine sport such as tennis or maybe wrestle with other girls, Young suggested. “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,” he wrote. “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.” The entire social order could be toppled if women like Toni Stone were allowed to keep playing baseball. “This could get to be a woman’s world,” Young warned, “with men just living in it!”
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By the end of 1954, the Monarchs were in last place, and the Clowns had won both the first and the second half of the season. Toni’s official line in Negro League games was a .197 average with thirteen singles and doubles in seventy-one times at bat. She posted three RBIs, walked seven times, and struck out eight.
*
Once again, there was no record of her performance during the majority of contests that were not sanctioned Negro League games. Kansas City signed to barnstorm for a month throughout Missouri and Kansas until autumn made playing baseball in the Midwest too cold. The season closed with increased grumblings and occasional flare-ups on the bus, some between Toni and the Cuban players. She resented that the Cubans seemed to dominate the roster and believed they were on the team only because they would play for less than black players. The altercations were not Toni’s finest moments and revealed how grasping she had become. Just as many men begrudged her desire to play baseball, Toni also at times diminished the ambitions of Cuban players. After one argument, Toni stood up and asked which players on the bus were with her. No one said a word.
When the end finally came, it occurred in the most mundane of circumstances. Toni found Buck and some of the players in a garage trying to coax one more trip out of the Monarchs bus. While she could not say exactly why, Toni felt as if she was standing at an impasse. As the men crowded around the bus, she asked for a word with O’Neil. They started talking but the conversation descended into bickering. Later, Toni could not remember what the two fought about. They could have argued about the bench jockeying or the forced twist of her swing or even Buck’s delight in retelling the “pussy high” story. She could not retrieve the specifics. When other players in the garage joined in and the exchange grew hot, Toni looked to her skipper for defense. But Buck “stood there and looked simple,” she said. “Did not do nothin’ in my defense,” she said, “in my defense whatsoever.” The moment staring face-to-face with Buck O’Neil froze in Toni’s memory for the rest of her life. It was as if everything in her life changed in that single instant. All she could say later was that “something was missing.”
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It was not that she had lost O’Neil’s support, as angry as she was with him. In truth, she had lost something much deeper. Standing in a dirty garage in the outskirts of the Midwest, Toni Stone lost what she never thought would abandon her. She lost her joy for the game.
At the end of the season, Toni turned in her uniform to the Monarchs bus driver. She collected her four hundred dollars for the last month’s pay, but did not receive the two-hundred-dollar end-of-the-year bonus from owner Tom Baird. In October word came that the Philadelphia Athletics, a major league team, would be moving to Kansas City and taking up residence in Blues Stadium. Trying to sound optimistic, Tom Baird declared that the city was big enough for two teams, but others worried that the new Kansas City Athletics would be the death of the Monarchs. Connie Morgan returned to Philadelphia and re-enrolled in accounting courses at William Penn business school. She would not be with the Clowns the next season. While she enjoyed traveling with the team, Syd’s press releases said her real objective was “to be a top-flight worker in a business office.”
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Just weeks after the close of the 1954 season, word came that Oscar Charleston was dead. The big man—some said he was so strong he could tear the horsehair off a baseball with one hand—had died of a heart attack at age fifty-seven. A few months later, Wendell Smith reported that Syd Pollock’s Indianapolis Clowns were “throwing in the sponge,” dropping out of the Negro League to play independent ball the coming season. Bunny Downs gave Syd his notice and quit as the Clowns’ longtime road manager. His diabetes had grown worse, and he couldn’t look at one more year riding on Big Red. “Bus baseball ain’t right for anybody as old as I am,” he said. “It’s downright intolerable.” Buck O’Neil began making calls to friends in Chicago. If the Monarchs ever go under, associates told him, let the Cubs know. There might be a job for him in the majors.
In Oakland, Toni’s older sister, Blanche, and her daughter Maria visited from Saint Paul. The Stone women loved California, and Alberga was at his most courtly squiring them around the Bay Area. There was talk that Blanche, Maria, and even Toni’s mother might actually move to the West Coast. Willa Stone wanted to start a new beauty parlor in Oakland and had ideas about buying an apartment building. All the changes swirled around Toni like an approaching thunderstorm. She packed her baseball glove and put the cleats that Gabby Street had given her back in their worn box. The trip back to Oakland seemed exceedingly long. “I got tired,” she said. “I got so tired.”
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James Leslie Wilkinson pitched for an Iowa semi-pro team until a broken wrist ended his playing career. In addition to owning the Monarchs, Wilkinson also served as the secretary of the Negro National League and treasurer of the Negro American League. He was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame in 2006 when he was acknowledged as “the man most responsible for saving black baseball during the Great Depression” (
http://web.baseball halloffame.org/hofers/detail.jsp?playerId=506642
).
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Thomas Y. Baird was born in 1885 in Madison County, Arkansas, and later moved with his parents to Kansas City, Kansas. After his railroad accident—which left him with a limp for the rest of his life—Baird opened a billiard parlor and began his involvement with the business of baseball (David Conrads, “Biography of Thomas Y. Baird,” Kansas City Public Library, Missouri Valley Special Collections, 1999).
†
The Peet Brothers company later became Colgate Palmolive.
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Howard “Sonny” Morgan (1936–1976) was a jazz percussionist with an interest in West African and Caribbean music. Morgan led his own band in Philadelphia from 1953 to 1960, then worked with musicians including Willie Bobo and Max Roach. He also arranged music for dance groups, including Geoffrey Holder’s Negro Ensemble Company, was a side musician for Count Basie and others, and performed on the 1969 soundtrack for the film
Slaves.
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Like New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, the Memphis Cotton Carnival was both a social and a civic celebration. In the early 1930s, city leaders thought a celebration might bring pride and revive the sagging city and organized the first event. White krewes paraded on floats, many of which were pulled by black men. After a young black bystander asked his parents “why all the Negroes were horses,” black community leaders organized their own separate event, the Cotton Makers’ Jubilee. The two events briefly merged in the 1980s. Today the celebration suffers from a declining reputation.
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In 1995, Sarasota High School awarded O’Neil an honorary high school diploma.
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In 1954 the following black players appeared on major league rosters: Brooklyn Dodgers Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Junior Gilliam, Sandy Amoros, Joe Black; Milwaukee Braves Bill Bruton, Henry Aaron, Jim Pendleton, Charley White; New York Giants Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, Ruben Gomez, Henry Thompson; Chicago Cubs Ernie Banks, Gene Baker, Luis Marquez; Cincinnati Reds Nino Escalera, Charlie Harmon; Pittsburgh Pirates Curtis Roberts, (Luis Marquez, traded midseason), Sam Jethoe; St. Louis Cardinals Tom Alston, Bill Greason, Brooks Lawrence; Cleveland Indians Larry Doby, Al Smith, Luke Easter, Dave Hoskins, Jose Santiago, Dave Pope; Chicago White Sox Minnie Minoso, Bob Boyd; Philadelphia Athletics Bob Trice, Joe Taylor, Vic Power; Baltimore Orioles Jose Heard; and Washington Senators Carlos Paula. Teams without black players included the Philadelphia Phillies, Detroit Tigers, New York Yankees, and Boston Red Sox (
Kansas City Call
, May 21, 1954; Larry Lester e-mail to author, September 3, 2009).
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Bob Gibson went on to become a powerful right-handed pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals. During his sixteen-year career he posted 251 wins against 174 losses. His ERA was 2.91 and he threw 3,117 strikeouts. Bob Gibson was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1981.
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Connie Morgan hit .178 in league games with seven singles, a double, and one RBI in forty-five at bats. She stole one base, walked seven times, and had eight strikeouts (Alan Pollock with James A. Riley, editor,
Barnstorming to Heaven: Syd Pollock and His Great Black Teams
, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006, 258).
Happiest Day of My LifeAfter you get on first base it takes a lot of
cooperation and understanding on the part of
your teammates to get you all the way home.
That goes for baseball or the everyday business
of living in a democracy.—J
ACKIE
R
OBINSON
1
B
unny Downs could not stop thinking about baseball. Even though he’d told Syd Pollock he was finished with the Negro League, he kept dreaming about making plays and scoring runs. Downs’s wife said that when he was sleeping, Bunny’s legs would kick and pump as if he were still running the bases. “Throw the ball!” he would shout.
2
To many fans, black baseball seemed to exist only in dreams. In 1955, the Kansas City Monarchs had their worst financial year in the team’s history, and Tom Baird was trimming everything, including meal money. Now, instead of buying a roadside dinner of crackers, sardines, an onion, and a can of beans, a player had to forgo one “side dish.” By the end of the season, Baird could no longer make the numbers work and sold the team to Ted Rasberry of the Detroit Stars. The storied franchise that had won seventeen pennants and two World Series and sent twenty-one players to the majors relocated to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and left Kansas City forever.
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