Toni Stone

On February 9, 2022, Google honored Stone's legacy and achievements by making her the Google Doodle on their homepage. The image depicts Stone fielding a baseball from her second base position and throwing the ball in the direction of first base, as the opposing team's runner crosses in front of her in the direction of second base. The Doodle was created by San Francisco-based illustrator and animation director, Monique Wray.

In 2020 and 2021, the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) nominated Stone for the Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award.

Almost twenty years later, Toni Stone, written by Lydia Diamond under commission from the Roundabout Theater Company and Samantha Barrie and premiering Off-Broadway in 2019, was based on Martha Ackmann's full-length biography, Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone. The play addresses Stone's baseball career, as well as the challenges that she faced as a black woman. Within a year of its publication, the play had been staged by several theaters around the country, though the COVID-19 Pandemic did inhibit its production.

Toni Stone died on November 2, 1996, of heart failure at a nursing home in Alameda, California. She was 75 years old.

In 1996, the Great American History Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, staged Roger Nieboer's Tomboy Stone soon after Stone's death, though it was not a critical success.

In 1990, she was included in two exhibits at the Baseball Hall of Fame, one on "Women in Baseball" and another on "Negro League Baseball". In 1993, Stone was inducted into the Women's Sports Hall of Fame, as well as the International Women's Sports Hall of Fame. In 1990, Stone's hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota, declared March 6 "Toni Stone Day". Saint Paul also has a field named after Toni Stone located at the Dunning Baseball Complex.

Stone's contract was sold to the Kansas City Monarchs prior to the 1954 season, and she retired following the season because of lack of playing time.

After the 1954 season, Stone moved to Oakland, California, to work as a nurse and care for her sick husband.

For the 1953 season, Stone was signed by Syd Pollock, owner of the Indianapolis Clowns, to play second base, the position Hank Aaron had played for the team before joining the Milwaukee Braves (now the Atlanta Braves). Pollock reportedly was trying to hire Stone for the Indianapolis Clowns since the close of the 1950 baseball season. While the media reported that she finally agreed to sign on for a staggering $12,000 for the season, many sources identify that figure as an untruth for publicity purposes. Other reports are that Pollock wanted Stone to play in a skirt or in shorts, and she refused, though she did wear a foam rubber chest protector. Pollock was a partner in several business ventures with Abe Saperstein, owner of the Harlem Globetrotters, and also one of the co-founders of the West Coast Negro Baseball Association. Similar to the trick basketball team, The Clowns both provided clown-style entertainment at games and played serious ball. Having a woman on the team attracted more spectators, but Stone also played seriously. She played 50 games in her season with the Clowns, batting .243.

SABR has looked particularly closely at Stone's claim that she got a hit off Satchel Paige, of the St. Louis Browns, on Easter Sunday in 1953. While no one has disproven the claim entirely, during the spring training when the exhibition game purportedly happened, there is no record of the Browns playing the Clowns.

Making a living on odd jobs while living in the Fillmore District, she took on the name "Toni Stone," which she felt was a better fit for her identity than "Marcenia." At Jack's Tavern, the first Black-owned nightclub in the neighborhood, she met Captain Aurelious Pescia Alberga, a native of Oakland and a WWI veteran. They married in 1950. While he continued to live in the San Francisco Bay Area as Stone pursued her career on baseball teams around the country, they remained married until he died at the age of 103 in the 1980s.

Stone talked her way onto the roster of the San Francisco Sea Lions by spring of 1949. The 1946 failure of the short-lived West Coast Negro Baseball Association, of which the Sea Lions had been a member, inspired owners Hal King and Harold Morris to take a chance on Stone's argument that she would draw crowds. She batted in two runs in her first time up. At the time, the Sea Lions were barnstorming around the country, so the work was hard. Stone soon became discontented with the owner of the Sea Lions after she discovered she was paid less than her male teammates. Stone joined the New Orleans Creoles (1949–1952).

By age 16, Stone was playing weekend games with the barnstorming Twin City Colored Giants. She got paid about $2-$3 a game, so her parents let her play. She eventually dropped out of high school with the hope of making a living playing baseball. In 1943 she moved to San Francisco where her sister lived.

Spending time at Jack's Tavern on Sutter, Stone became friends with one of the owners, Alroyd "Al" Love. Love introduced her to the local American Legion Baseball team, which was part of the national network of amateur baseball teams for teenagers. Stone had unofficially played some ball with an American Legion team in Minnesota. In San Francisco, because of age limits for the American Legion teams, Stone subtracted ten years from her age, claiming to be 17 instead of 27. She played with the team in San Francisco from 1943 to 1945.

Toni Stone (July 17, 1921 – November 2, 1996), born as Marcenia Lyle Stone in West Virginia, was the first of three women to play professional baseball full-time for the Indianapolis Clowns, in the previously all-male Negro leagues. This also made her the first woman to play as a regular on an American big-league professional baseball team. A baseball player from her early childhood, she went on to play for the San Francisco Sea Lions, the New Orleans Creoles, the Indianapolis Clowns, and the Kansas City Monarchs before retiring from baseball in 1954. Stone was taunted at times by teammates, once being told, “Go home and fix your husband some biscuits,” but she was undeterred. It has been widely reported that during an exhibition game in 1953, she hit a single off a fastball pitch delivered by legendary player Satchel Paige, although this is also disputed.