Picture courtesy The New York Times
Right after Postmarks posted a link to the Toni Stone article, we were made of aware of another article about female players in the Negro Leagues that was published in today's New York Times. It's about another fascinating woman named Mamie Johnson. Here's an excerpt:
Known as Peanut during her playing days because she stood 5 feet 3 inches, Johnson claims to have gone 33-8 and hit in the .260s for the Clowns, but research into the scant records of barnstorming games provides little corroboration. (Baseball writers for black newspapers had also left for the majors.) Nonetheless, Johnson was no female Eddie Gaedel, a one-day novelty who endures. She was good enough to dull the question of why she was there and perhaps her ultimate legacy. Such was the downside of her legitimacy.
“She was a drawing card, I have to say,” said her catcher on the Clowns, Arthur Hamilton, also 75 and now living in Jacksonville, Fla. “She didn’t have that much of a fastball, but she could put the ball over the plate. She’d get out of the inning. A lot of guys hit her, but she got a lot of guys out, too. The Kansas City Monarchs and the Birmingham Black Barons loved to play the Clowns, because we’d have a big crowd.”
Johnson was destined to break some sort of barrier ever since her sandlot youth in South Carolina and New Jersey, where she fashioned baseballs out of taped-up rocks and loathed softballs because, she recalled disdainfully, they felt more like cantaloupes. Clearly as good as the boys when she reached 18 in 1953, she first wanted to try out for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the circuit later immortalized in the movie “A League of Their Own.” She went to a tryout in Washington with a friend, not knowing the league still had no black players six years after Jackie Robinson’s debut in Brooklyn.
Click here to read the rest of the article.
