SAN FRANCISCO -- The parents’ arguments against sports, specifically baseball, had no effect. When opponents slid into second base, spikes high, often breaking the skin, there was no flinching. Even the ridicule of teammates didn’t blunt the desire to play on.
Being the loneliest person, on the field and off, wouldn’t keep Toni Stone away from baseball.
The game was, after all, the only company she needed.
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Thousands of inspiring stories lurk beneath the well-publicized surface of American sport, and the tale of Toni Stone, is one of them. She was a woman eager to play alongside men. She was a black woman determined to play what the country at the time had decreed was a white man’s game.
Which makes her story ripe for the telling, which the San Francisco American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) will do. Lydia Diamond’s play, based on the book “Curveball,” by Martha Ackmann and directed by Tony award winner Pam MacKinnon, opens Thursday night and runs through May 29 at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater.
Toni’s story is familiar mostly to devoted historians of the game. Born Marcenia Lyle Stone in 1921 West Virginia, the family moved to Minneapolis, where young Toni developed a fondness for the game and persisted until she reached as high as allowed, which at that time the Negro Leagues, where she played from 1949 until 1954, starting with the San Francisco Sea Lions in '49.
Really, though, it’s an inspirational life tale told through the prism of baseball.
Oakland Athletics
“It’s a deeply personal story told in 50 scenes,” MacKinnon said in a recent interview.
Dawn Ursula, the vibrant actress who will play Stone on stage, goes a couple steps further.
“This baseball story tells and honors Toni Stone’s story and also makes that connective tissue to any person that has such a compelling love and passion for anything that you’re just a little crazy about it -- in the best way,” she said. “It thrills you. You have to do it. There’s something in your soul that won’t allow you to do anything else. Sometimes, it beats you up and you want to give it up. But you can’t because it’s there, always present, and when you try to do other things you come back to it.”
Stone wasn’t just a fill-in player, though she was signed -- largely for gate appeal -- to play second base for the Indianapolis Clowns in 1953, one year after a man named Henry Aaron played the same position before leaving for the major leagues, where he became a player of rather considerable distinction.
Stone batted .243 in ‘53, and among the highlights was a single off the great Satchel Paige. She was a baller despite the obstacles. She was not allowed in the clubhouse. There were instances of racial and sexual segregation common that presented hardship. Hotels that booked black Americans did not allow a woman to be roommates with a man, so Stone often was forced to bunk in a house of prostitution.
When buses stopped for bathroom breaks, Stone’s teammates would urinate using the bus as cover. She had to find a more private spot, often in the dark of night. That’s real commitment.
“She knew who she was,” MacKinnon said. “This was core identity. To not play baseball would be to not be Toni Stone. There is something fundamentally inspiring and interesting watching someone know who she is and demanding that the world catch up.”
By the time the world began to catch up and not only allow women to play sports at all levels but to actually provide legislated support, Stone was long retired and living in Oakland with her husband, Aurelius Pescia Alberga, whom she met in a San Francisco nightclub. He died in 1987. Stone succumbed to heart failure in 1996 at an Alameda nursing facility. She was 75.
“There are so many lost heroes and heroines that have not been shared in our total collective history that deserve to be in the history books,” Ursula said. “Not just sports history books. Not in black history books. But in history books. And I truly believe this woman is one of those people.”
Stone’s parents actually thought it “sinful” for a girl to play sports. There was no stopping their daughter, who once described baseball as “like a drug” to her, which explains her obsession with the game to such degree that she was willing to endure the hell she paid.
“I feel passionate about correcting a little bit of history and wanting this woman to be known,” MacKinnon said. “There is that. And I also feel everyone in the audience should maybe have a tiny bit of reflection of like, ’What is it inside me that is key, and how can I push myself a little bit more to let the world know that’s who I am?’ "