Toni Stone broke gender barriers when she became the first woman player in a men’s professional baseball league. She would have just turned 98 — now, her story is being celebrated in an off-Broadway show.
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00:00History has not remembered her the way it should.
00:02She's not written into the history books at all, at all, at all.
00:15I want to tell you something about
00:20reaching and me.
00:24Because you may have heard,
00:26I am the first woman to ever play professional ball.
00:40I was sort of aghast that I wouldn't have heard of her.
00:43It didn't make any sense that we would know who Toni Stone is.
00:47She should be right up there with all of the incredible athletes
00:51whose names roll off of our tongue.
00:53It's not right.
00:54I wanted to help introduce her to the world.
01:09She was a black woman in the Jim Crow South,
01:13but she was also the only woman in a team full of men
01:18playing in an arena in which sometimes they were playing
01:21against white teams who sort of just hated them already.
01:40Toni Stone wouldn't have been allowed to play in the Negro Leagues.
01:44When she and two of her contemporaries,
01:46she was the first black woman.
01:48There were two others after her.
01:49They tried to audition for that league and they were not allowed to.
01:55So here's the thing, right?
01:57There's no crying in baseball.
01:59Toni was like, okay, then that's fine.
02:02I'm going to go play with the men.
02:13In the play, we have men play women
02:16and we have men play white people, white men.
02:19It was a difficult decision to make
02:21because I also didn't want to be not employing,
02:25you know, five or six women.
02:27Here's the thing.
02:28I really love the image of us seeing visually
02:33what that was for Toni to be the only woman.
02:36And so then at the end of the play, Toni Stone says,
02:46And in that breath is life.
02:49And I just think that that says everything
02:51and it says everything about baseball,
02:53but it says so much more about life.
02:55I think that when we see ourselves represented on stage,
02:59whether we are women, whether we're people of color,
03:02whether we're anyone who identifies as other,
03:05it's affirming.
03:07It's hugely and strangely affirming to see yourself represented.
03:11Here we are.
03:12We're here and we're all different shapes and sizes
03:15and sexual orientations and we won't be not seen.