“I WAS ALREADY THE ONLY WOMAN TO BE A MAJOR LEAGUE PITCHER,” SAID MAMIE JOHNSON, WHO WENT 33-8 FOR THE INDIANAPOLIS CLOWNS IN 1953-55. “NO ONE ELSE WAS—WHITE, BLACK, BLUE OR GREEN. NO ONE. AND I HAVE.”
She wasn't quite in a league of her own, but 50 years ago Mamie "Peanut" Johnson was among just a handful of women to play in the Negro Leagues of baseball. At 17, Johnson tried out for a spot on a professional women's team, but was rejected because of her race.
"They didn't let us try out," Johnson recalls, in a Morning Edition interview with NPR's Bob Edwards. "They just looked at us like we were crazy as if to say, 'What do you want?'"
But Johnson insists it's the best thing that could have happened to her career. The rejection led her to a spot in the men's Negro Leagues, which featured legends such as Satchel Paige, whom she says helped her perfect her curveball. "I got to meet and be with some of the best baseball players that ever picked up a bat, so I'm very proud about that."
In 1953, Johnson was recruited to play with the Indianapolis Clowns, where she became the league's first female pitcher. Her story is recounted in a new book, A Strong Right Arm by Michelle Y. Green.
Edwards asks Johnson how she got along with male ballplayers, who tend to be a "rowdy" bunch. Johnson replies with a laugh: "Well, I can get rowdy, too. That's no problem. I met some of the nicest gentlemen I could ever meet and I got the highest respect in the world from all of them."
But, she adds, "you've got your gentlemen, and then you've got your men." Some of the "men" don't know how to act, she says, "but after you prove yourself as to what you came there for, then you don't have any problem out of them, either. After you strike three or four of them out and, you know, it's alright."
She struck many of them out. In the year she played, her record was 33-8, but Johnson was quick to praise her teammates for helping her achieve it.
Playing major league baseball was a "beautiful" experience, she says. "When you learn to do something and do it well, you begin to enjoy it."
Mamie Johnson feels a kinship with Eri Yoshida, the Japanese female knuckleballer who recently became one of the few women ever to pitch in professional baseball. She nods knowingly at suspicions that Yoshida, the 18-year-old so-called Knuckle Princess, pitches for the far-flung Chico (Calif.) Outlaws less as a competitor than as a curiosity.
But when Johnson hears that Yoshida dreams of being the first female pitcher in major league history, she sends a message as high and tight as those she once threw in the Negro leagues. You are crowding her plate.
“I was already the only woman to be a major league pitcher,” said Johnson, 75, who pitched for the Indianapolis Clowns from 1953 to 1955. “No one else was — white, black, blue or green. No one. And I have.”
Historians might demur at equating the withering 1950s Negro American League with the established major leagues, given how even most average black players had followed Jackie Robinson and signed with formerly all-white teams in the American and National Leagues. By 1954, Johnson’s only full season with the Clowns, the four remaining Negro American League teams were scrambling to forestall their inevitable demise.
Indianapolis, which had recently pawned the 18-year-old Hank Aaron to the Boston Braves, was a nomadic outfit with a tuxedoed King Tut and a wacky dwarf as gate attractions. The Clowns also signed three female players often forgotten in discussions of athletic barrier-breakers: Toni Stone and Connie Morgan, two infielders now deceased, and Johnson, still throwing up and in, if only from her dining room table.
On modern players: “They’re playing on a carpet as smooth as this table, and they can’t bend down to get the ball. We were taught to block the ball! You don’t have to stick your hand out there like a fool!”
On Manny Acta, the former manager of the local Washington Nationals: “Oooh, he was something I’d like to take and put on the chopping block. He just did it all backwards. He’s in Cleveland now. What’s he won, two games?”
On the quality of the Negro leagues: “Everybody hit. Everybody played.”
Johnson lives about a mile from the Capitol in the brightest house on her block, where a yellow-and-white candy-store awning signals the fun awaiting within. A gal who learned her curveball from Satchel Paige lives there. Her raspy chatter all but comes from the top step of a dugout.
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.
“They looked at us like we were crazy, as if to say, What do you want here?” Johnson said. “We stood around for maybe 10 or 15 minutes. I didn’t say anything. Rita didn’t say anything. And they didn’t say anything either. So I said to Rita: ‘I guess we better go. I don’t think we’re wanted here.’ So we left.”
Johnson was soon discovered playing semipro ball by a scout for the Clowns. She barnstormed during the end of the 1953 season, then pitched all of 1954 for what The Florence (S.C.) Morning News called “the Globetrotters of baseball” when she came to town. As for her repertory, she threw a fastball, a slider, a circle change, a screwball.
“There were a whole lot of pitches I threw, honey,” she said.
What about a knuckleball, like Yoshida?
“Nope,” Johnson said. “Hands too little. Couldn’t grip it good enough.”
In 1955, having spent close to two years away from her toddler son, Johnson loosened her grip on baseball. She left the Clowns, studied nursing at New York University and ultimately worked at Sibley Hospital in Washington for close to 40 years. In retirement, she manned a nearby Negro leagues memorabilia store before it closed a few years ago.
Appreciation for all Negro leagues players has grown in the past decade or so, and Johnson’s cellar has several dozen baseballs from games at which she has delivered the ceremonial first pitch, along with plaques and photographs and a personalized Wheaties box someone made for her. As for the 33-8 record fired onto a ceramic plate, Larry Lester, a Kansas City-based scholar considered the leading historian of Negro leagues baseball, said he maintained a fond skepticism.
“Mamie’s a dear friend, but history is history,” said Lester, who runs an annual conference devoted to the Negro leagues. “But she was a history maker, without a doubt. Major League Baseball broke the racial barrier, and the Negro leagues broke the gender barrier.”
Johnson said she would love to speak on the phone with Yoshida, who was scheduled to make her second start for Chico on Saturday night. The Outlaws are thinking of flying in Johnson for a promotion sometime this summer.
Johnson said she wanted to tell Yoshida about the old Negro leagues — the competition, the guys on the bus. (Although translating Satchel Paige to Japanese could be tricky.) She will recall the day that the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League turned her away, toward a path on which Yoshida is only starting.
“I’m so glad to this day that they turned me down,” Johnson said of the all-white women’s league. “To know that I was good enough to be with these gentlemen made me the proudest lady in the world. Now I can say that I’ve done something that no other woman has ever done.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Wednesday, June 16th 2010 at 10:27PM
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