“Toni Stone, a scrappy second baseman who became a footnote to baseball history in 1953 as a member of the Negro League’s Indianapolis Clowns when she became the first woman to play as a regular on a big-league professional team, died on Nov. 2 at a nursing home in Alameda, Calif. She was 75 and had lived in Oakland, Calif., for many years.
The cause was heart failure, a friend said.
She was, by her own account, a tomboy who grew up to be a ‘big, sassy girl.’ When Syd Pollock, the Clowns’ owner (and a sometime business partner of Abe Saperstein, the owner of the clowning Harlem Globetrotters), decided he needed a woman on the Clowns to help attract fans, it was hardly surprising that he chose the 5-foot-7 1/2-inch, 148-pound St. Paul native who had been playing baseball with the boys since she was a girl and with the men ever since…”
First African-American woman to play in the Negro Leagues, on the men’s Indianapolis Clowns team.
