It was reported that during an exhibition game in 1953, she hit a single off a fastball pitch delivered by legendary player Satchel Paige, although the claim has failed verification.
[8] Her father was a barber, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute, who also served in the United States Army during World War I.
[9][3] Stone was ten years old when her family moved to the Rondo neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota,[4] and her parents opened the Boykin's Barber and Beauty Shop.
In hopes of learning to be a better player, Stone joined the girls' softball team, HighLex, but was dissatisfied with play in that sport.
[9] Still searching for instruction, Stone would show up and watch the baseball school run by the St. Paul Saints' manager, Gabby Street.
At Jack's Tavern, the first Black-owned nightclub in the neighborhood,[13][14] she met Captain Aurelious Pescia Alberga, a native of Oakland and a WWI veteran.
[15][16] 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.
[17] Spending time at Jack's Tavern on Sutter, Stone became friends with one of the owners, Alroyd "Al" Love.
[22] The 1946 failure of the short-lived West Coast Negro Baseball Association,[22] of which the Sea Lions had been a member, inspired owners Hal King and Harold Morris[23][20] to take a chance on Stone's argument that she would draw crowds.
[16] While the media reported that she finally agreed to sign on for a staggering $12,000 for the season,[16] 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,[11] though she did wear a foam rubber chest protector.
[24] 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.
[26][21] The newspapers at the time claimed that attendance at Clowns' games hit record levels when she started playing, and she was heavily featured on the team's promotional materials.
Bunny Downs, manager of the Clowns, had reportedly once told Stone that "she'd better stick to knitting and home cooking," but publicly claimed to be won over after seeing her play.
She would show off the scars on her left wrist and remember the time she had been spiked by a runner trying to take out the woman standing on second base.
[4][36] In 2020 and 2021, the Society for American Baseball Research nominated Stone for the Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award.
[42] Stone's purported $12,000 annual signing salary with the Clowns,[11][43][44] which Pollock claimed was more than Jackie Robinson's first major-league contract,[45] was more likely around $350 to $400 a month.
The Society for American Baseball Research 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.
[32][28] 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.