Stone, Toni [Marcenia Lyle]
Baseball
b. July 17, 1921, St. Paul, MN
d. Nov. 2, 1996
Marcenia Lyle simply wanted to play baseball. As a young girl, she played in a kind of early version of the Little League that was set up by Wheaties cereal for youngsters who collected enough box tops. During her teens, she was the only girl to attend a baseball school run by former major league catcher Gabby Street, who was then managing the minor-league St. Paul Saints. And she kept playing in sandlot and pickup games, against boys and men.
She went to San Francisco, took the name Toni Stone, and played centerfield for an American Legion team. From there, she moved to one of the outstanding black barnstorming teams, the San Francisco Sea Lions. During their tour of the South, she wasn't getting the pay she'd been promised, so she jumped to the New Orleans Black Pelicans--a team that the legendary Satchel Paige had played for, twenty years before.
In 1949, she joined the New Orleans Creoles for $300 a month. At the time, there were still black major leagues; the Creoles were in the black minor leagues. Stone played second base with the Creoles for four seasons before being signed by the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League in 1953.
She became the first woman to play in a professional major league. The black major leagues were dying because, after Jackie Robinson had broken the "color barrier" in 1947, the best black players were no longer available to them. Stone's signing was probably partly an effort to get some publicity. She earned $12,000 to play in about fifty games that season, and batted .243.
The following season, she went to the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League. She didn't get to play very much, so she retired when the season was over. But she kept playing sandlot and pickup games until she was sixty, just as she had when she was ten years old.
A baseball field in her native St. Paul, Minnesota, is named for her.