Toni Stone was large league baseball’s first full-time lady participant when she joined the Indianapolis Clowns in 1953. Stone and the eventual league-champion Clowns performed a minimum of 9 Western New York dates that 12 months.
When Toni Stone grabbed her mitt and took to the sector as a 2nd baseman for the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League in 1953, she was the primary lady to play as a standard on a professional, large league staff.
During the Fifties, Buffalo’s Offermann Stadium used to be a 2nd house to the Clowns. Data are sketchy, however the 1953 League Champion Clowns performed a minimum of seven house video games in Buffalo, plus a minimum of two extra Western New York contests at Hyde Park in Niagara Falls and at Jamestown’s Municipal Stadium.
Stone changed Hank Aaron because the Clowns full-time 2nd baseman when he used to be signed through the Braves.
Clowns promoter Syd Pollack attempted to make a touch in signing Stone, and made claims within the media that her contract used to be price $12,000 for the season – greater than used to be being paid to Jackie Robinson that 12 months.
Historical past, or even some journalists on the time, discovered the declare spurious, nevertheless it looked as if it would make for just right ink in newspapers in virtually each the city the place she and the Clowns performed.
“She’s no chump,” reported the Brantford Expositor in Brantford, Ont., the place the Clowns performed the day after taking at the Memphis Pink Sox at Offermann Stadium in Buffalo. “This is a actual exhibition with the lady conserving her personal with the men. No person eases up as a result of Toni is at bat. She grabs the daisy cutters like a global collection operator. Toni has damaged down any prejudice males have of getting a lady at the lineup.”
