Who Is Baseball Player Toni Stone And What Was Her Cause Of Death?

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REMEMBERING one of the first women to ever play professional baseball for a major men’s baseball league.

Toni Stone was one of the first women to play baseball professionally for the Indianapolis Clowns.

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Who is Toni Stone?

Originally known as Marcenia Lyle Stone, Toni was the first woman to ever play baseball professionally on a regular basis in a major men’s baseball league.

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Toni was born on July 17, 1921, in Bluefield, West Virginia.

In 1931, the Stone family moved to Minnesota where Toni developed her love for baseball.

Stone grew up playing several different sports such as football, basketball, golf, hockey, and tennis, but baseball was her calling.

At the age of 16, Toni had joined what was previously known as an all-male team, the Twin Cities Colored Giants club.

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Toni kicked off her professional baseball career with the San Francisco Sea Lions in the West Coast Negro Baseball League.

In 1949, Stone began playing for the New Orleans Black Pelicans and the New Orleans Creoles.

Filling a vacancy that was left by Hank Arron, in 1953 Stone played with the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro American League where she played second base.

During the 1920s, the Negro League was composed of teams with African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latin Americans.

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Personifying her talent, Stone was the best pitcher in the league as she hit a single off Satchel Paige.

Stone only played with the Indianapolis Clowns briefly as in 1954 she traded to the Kansas City Monarchs.

According to Stones Britannica Biography, she had the ability to run 100 yards in 11 seconds.

In hindsight, this meant that Stone had the ability to sprint 90 feet down the baseball path in 3.3 seconds.

In 2020, the average speed from home to first base was 4.2-4.3 seconds.

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Why did Stone change her name?

When Stone first joined the baseball league in 1949, the baseball player made the decision to change her name.

Originally named Marcenia Lyle Stone by her parents, the San Francisco Sea Lions player decided to change her name to Toni Stone.

The decision was made after Toni felt that her birth name was “too cute.”

How did Toni Stone die?

At the age of 75, the baseball role model passed away.

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On November 2, 1966, Stone passed away in a nursing home in Alameda in California.

The death occurred due to heart failure.

Several years on, Stone’s legacy lives on.

In 1990 stones hometown of Minnesota where she moved to at a young age with her family declared March 6th as “Toni Stone Day” in the city.

That same year Stone was also honored in the National Baseball Hall of Fame Museum and Exhibits on Women in Baseball and Negro League Baseball.

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Three years later in 1933, Stone was also inducted into the Women’s Sports Hall of Fame.

Stone was married to Aurelious Alberga in 1950, who passed away in 1987 at the age of 103.