“Tomboy Toni” spent a whole lot of time on her toes.

Like so many black parents, the Stones had encouraged their 4 children to get an education that no one could take from them. But try as she might, Toni just couldn’t get the hang of books and preferred the cracks of baseball bats in the springtime instead.

When they pleaded with the local priest to talk their 10-year-old daughter out of the fruitless sin of a girl playing baseball, Toni was so persuasive, they all agreed to let her become the first girl on the church league roster, positioned at second base.

But Toni still had bigger dreams. She’d discovered that the manager of the St. Paul (Minnesota) Saints coached a boys’ team not far from where she lived, and was determined to find a way onto it. What she didn’t know was that he was a card-carrying member of the KKK. What he didn’t know was that she was so persistent, he’d eventually surprise himself by letting her show him what she was made of. She surprised him even more when she had skills that were too good to let his racism get in the way of.

While she was training, she also happened to be a ball girl for a local pickup team, and the sharp-eyed manager of the all-male semi pro Twin City Colored Giants noticed that the 15-year-old had an arm that qualified her to be a lot more. A spot on their team gave her a visibility that she didn’t have before, and after proving she had the skills to go even bigger, she kept swinging for the fences.

By 25, she’d become a darling of the San Francisco Sea Lions, until she discovered that she was being paid less than her male counterparts, so she took her talents to the Black Pelicans and Creoles of New Orleans instead. Finding love along the way became a unexpected detour. A domineering older husband kept her out of the game for a year, encouraging her to play for the local American Legion instead but her passion was too strong to ignore. “He would have stopped me if he could have, but he couldn’t,” she laughed, and it was seeming more and more obvious that very little could get in Toni Stone’s way.

Her return to baseball couldn’t have been more well timed. The Indianapolis Clowns had just lost a once-in-a-lifetime shortstop named Hank Aaron to the recently integrated Major Leagues. They needed more than just skill to fill his place – they needed a star. In 1953, 32-year old Toni Stone became that star, the first woman to play in the Negro Leagues, and the first female professional in a major baseball organization. Ironically enough, Toni had wanted to play for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League depicted in “A League of Their Own,” but black women weren’t allowed. Her rejection from their league led her to make even greater strides in her own. (And when asked to wear a skirt herself, she told the Clowns’ owner that she’d “quit first.”)

Even mainstream sports journalists couldn’t deny her unbelievable combination of femininity and fierceness, writing “She belts home runs as easily as most girls catch stitches in their knitting, and the sports boys are goggle-eyed.” Toni’s strength on and off the field was so inspiring to her club that two more women were added to the roster during her tenure. A year later, she transferred to the Kansas City Monarchs where Jackie Robinson once played, and finally retired from baseball in 1955.

Although Toni was inducted into the Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1996 three years before she died at the ripe old age of 75, because her race and gender kept her from the Major Leagues she’s still widely regarded as both “the First Lady of the Negro Leagues” and “the best ball player you’ve never heard of.”

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