St. Paul, Minneapolis to host state’s first girls baseball tournament June 11-12

When Toni Stone grew to become one in every of three girls to play skilled baseball within the Negro Leagues within the Nineteen Forties and ’50s, the trade wasn’t prepared for her. Workforce house owners pressured her to put on a skirt for intercourse enchantment, which she refused, and she or he walked away from jobs that paid her lower than her male teammates, who typically shunned her, or worse. By all accounts, she discovered to indicate off cuts she acquired from shoe spikes like scars of struggle.

Stone, who was raised in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood, persevered, enjoying on a number of groups across the nation earlier than changing the legendary Hank Aaron on second base for the Indianapolis Clowns, a trick baseball crew owned by the identical administration because the Harlem Globetrotters. At this time, St. Paul youth run the bases at Toni Stone Discipline, by town’s Dunning Sports activities Complicated off Marshall Avenue, one in every of a number of methods wherein Stone’s legacy lives on.

In an effort to each rejoice Stone and elevate women baseball, the Minnesota Twins are inviting women ages 7-14 from throughout the Higher Midwest to play ball — baseball, not softball — within the Toni Stone Invitational, the state’s first-ever all-girls baseball event, which shall be held at Toni Stone Discipline and three different Twin Cities places on June 11 and 12. No expertise is important, and women will enroll as people and be positioned on groups by age bracket.

Registration is $50 to $75, and it comes with a three-game assure and 4 tickets to a Twins recreation on June 10. Extra data is on-line at TwinsBaseball.com/Invitational.

“As a result of there’s not that many alternatives for women to play baseball, we wished to create one, simply to attempt it for the weekend,” mentioned Chelsey Falzone, supervisor of youth engagement for the Twins. “This event isn’t a qualifier for something. You’re not going to state in case you win. Should you play softball, excellent. Should you don’t play softball, excellent. It’s simply a chance to say, hey, you belong in baseball.”

The Toni Stone Invitational is partially the work of Justine Siegal, a 1998 graduate of St. Olaf Faculty in Northfield and the founding father of Baseball for All, a nonprofit that helps women youth and faculty baseball groups nationally. In 2015, Siegal grew to become the primary girl to teach a Main League Baseball crew when she joined the Oakland Athletics’ educational league in Arizona for 2 weeks.

“These women deserve the perfect,” mentioned Siegal, who threw batting apply for the Cleveland Indians throughout spring coaching in 2011 and holds a doctorate in sports activities psychology. “They should be believed in. All women are welcome. Should you can catch and throw, come out and play. Toni Stone is a hero to many people. She led the best way.”

The event dates fall on MLB’s annual “Play Ball” weekend, in addition to through the fiftieth anniversary month of the influential Title IX legislation, the portion of the federal Civil Rights Act that stops discrimination on the idea of intercourse by any instructional program receiving federal funds.

Falzone famous that till not too long ago, skilled assets for women fascinated by baseball, versus softball, have usually been the exception, quite than the rule. Pawtucket, R.I., is residence to the oldest women baseball league within the nation, and USA Baseball fashioned the nationwide girls’s crew — Workforce USA — in 2004.

“MLB is beginning to put assets behind women baseball proper now, however there hasn’t been an excessive amount of of a marketplace for it but,” Falzone acknowledged. “We’re enthusiastic about the place this may go.”

Toni Stone died in 1996 on the age of 75, however there’s an uncommon post-script to her profession. In December 2020, just a few months after the dying of George Floyd in Minneapolis, MLB elevated the Negro Leagues — seven distinct leagues from 1920 to 1948 — to major-league standing, including their gamers, video games and statistics to the official MLB report. With that call, Stone grew to become one of many first feminine main leaguers within the historical past of the game.