Trailblazing baseball player gets her due in ‘Toni Stone.’
Trailblazing Bay Area pro baseball player gets her due in ‘Toni Stone’
Lydia R. Diamond clearly remembers being introduced to the remarkable story of Toni Stone, the longtime Bay Area resident who became the first woman to play professional baseball when she was signed to the
Negro League in the 1940s.
“I was shocked that
I didn’t know who she was,” says the acclaimed playwright, known for adapting Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” for the stage, among other works. “I was previously not a big baseball fan. But I still know who Jackie Robinson is and I know who Babe Ruth is. She, I felt, should have been in that echelon of people who you just know.
“Then I started finding out that people who knew baseball didn’t know her and it just felt wrong in every way.”
So she decided that she
wanted to tell this historically significant, yet overlooked story — which had been pitched to her by stage producer Samantha Barrie and director Pam MacKinnon — and signed on to write what would become “Toni Stone.” The play is now in previews at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, with the main run set for March 1129.
Stone was a true trailblazer who broke the Negro League’s gender barrier and eventually took over for — get this — the legendary Hank Aaron at second base for the Indianapolis Clowns in 1953.
“As an actress, playing Toni Stone is one of the highlights of my career,” says actress Dawn Ursula. “There are iconic roles you hope to be lucky enough to play, like ‘Ruth’ in ‘A Raisin in the Sun.’ Toni is that for me. What makes it even more meaningful is that she was real and, sadly, I had never heard of her before.
“I get to play this incredible character, but also this incredible real person and help spread her fame to people who have been robbed of knowing her, and I am feeling incredibly grateful and lucky.”
MacKinnon says there’s an easy answer to why so many people don’t know about Stone.
“I think it’s pretty straightforward: We live in a very sexist and racist world,” says MacKinnon, who took over as American Conservatory Theater’s artistic director last year.
The play is based on the book “Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone” by Martha Ackmann and is the culmination of a seven-year quest by Diamond and MacKinnon. It’s is the second staging of the show, following a well-received world premiere run at the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York City in 2019.
The play follows the life of this pioneering athlete, who was born in 1921 in Bluefield, West Virginia, raised in Minneapolis (she played on a Catholic school boys baseball team at age 10) and spent most of her life living in the Bay Area.
“She moved to the Bay Area, like a lot of black Americans during World War II, in search of work,” says MacKinnon of Stone. “An older sister of hers had moved out here from the Twin Cities a couple of years earlier. Toni came in search of work because this was a port city. She worked on the docks. She worked in steel mills. She lived in the Fillmore District (in San Francisco).” Stone later crossed the Bay to live in Oakland and then Alameda.
Her first taste of pro ball came in the late ’40s, when she joined the San Francisco Sea Lions of the minor league West Coast Negro Baseball League. She bounced around with a handful of teams before landing with the famed Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League.
It was an interesting time for the Negro League, following Jackie Robinson’s arrival on the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and the continued integration of Major League Baseball.
“Negro leagues were losing many of their top players to the majors and were falling under financial difficulties,” MacKinnon says. “Sydney Pollack, an owner of Indianapolis Clowns, went after Toni Stone kind of as a gate attraction — ‘come see the girl phenom.’
“She proved to be much more than that. She proved to be an amazing player.”
Life in the Negro League proved anything but easy for Stone, who had to endure hostile crowds, sexist teammates, getting spiked by opposing players sliding into second and other hardships and indignities. But she struck a blow for gender equality that is still being felt to this day.
Yet, that’s not the primary reason why Stone wanted to play for the Negro League.
“It was pure love of the game and nothing else,” Diamond says of Stone, who died in an Alameda nursing home in 1996 at the age of 75.
“She was an elite athlete at anything she did. But baseball was her love. Her goal wasn’t to be the first woman to do anything. Her goal was to play baseball — which she did well, with a passion and a singular focus.”
Correspondingly, “Toni Stone” is, at its very heart, “a baseball play in the tradition of some of the best baseball plays — like ‘Damn Yankees’ the musical and ‘Take Me Out’ by Richard Greenberg,” MacKinnon says.
But it’s also a story of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life — and wasn’t going to let gender politics and expectations get in her way.
“What I find very remarkable about Toni Stone, still to this day, is that she knew who she was,” the director adds. “And she made damn sure that the rest of the world caught up to that.
“She knew she was a baseball player.”