‘Peanut’ Johnson, hard-throwing woman in Negro leagues, dies at 82

In the 1950s, several years after Jackie Robinson became the first black player to take the field in a major-league game in the 20th century, Mamie “Peanut” Johnson made baseball history of her own.

She may have been slight, at 5-foot-4 and less than 120 pounds, but she had a strong right arm and a competitive spirit that took her from the sandlots of Washington into professional baseball, with the Indianapolis Clowns of the old Negro leagues.

Johnson stood out in a world of hardened men, grueling travel and low pay as one of three women to play in the Negro leagues, and the only one who was a pitcher.

Her achievements have been honored at the White House, at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., in a play and a book and at a neighborhood ballpark near her home in Northeast D.C.

She died Dec. 18 at a Washington hospital at age 82. The cause was a heart ailment, said a stepdaughter, Yvonne Livingston.

Johnson’s nickname came from an opposing player’s derisive comment that, when she stood on the mound, she looked no bigger than a peanut. Johnson struck him out, she recalled.

Records from the Negro leagues are incomplete, and it is impossible to verify Johnson’s statistics with the Clowns. She claimed to have won 33 games and lost 8 from 1953-55.

She was 17 when she and another young woman went to a tryout in Alexandria, Va., for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which was portrayed in the 1992 film A League of Their Own. Although major-league baseball was integrated by then, the women’s league was all white.

A rejection by the women’s league, she said, was a blessing in disguise.

“If I would have played with the women,” she told the Kansas City Star in 2010, “I would have missed out on the opportunity that I received, and I would have just been another player.”