Happy Friday! Content Creator Tony is back for a baseball edition of TonySPN!

Next Wednesday, many Trivia Mafia hosts will be taking themselves out to the ballgame for some peanuts, Cracker Jack, and maybe a craft beer from one of the many awesome breweries you can play Trivia Mafia at. The St. Paul Saints are hosting the Iowa Cubs on June 7, but more importantly, they’re also hosting us! And we, in turn, are hosting a trivia game through the seventh-inning stretch!

It gets even better – Host Emily Olson is throwing the first pitch. Co-Owner Chuck will be sitting in on the radio broadcast for an inning. We’ll have a table by the entrance so you can say hi to us. It’ll be rad. You can sit in our block if you get a ticket now, using the code trivia2023.

Whether you’re simply taking in the atmosphere at beautiful CHS Field or calculating Matt Wallner’s OPS in real-time, one thought will be running through everyone’s head at some point: “Shouldn’t I be at a museum instead?”

If you find yourself in that boat, we’ve got good news for you: You can. And we’re not just talking about Monument Pork, which has historical plaques dedicated to the Ball Pigs who have passed on, even though those are delightful. Their adorable tribute to “Notorious P.I.G.” reads as such:

“One of the baddest, but most misunderstood pigs in Saints Swine history. He made his mark on the East Coast, but Minnesota became more than flyover country on his way to Los Angeles…. It was no coincidence that with Piggy at the helm the Saints ended a run of five consecutive seasons of .500 or worse.”

It’s a big pen to fill, but we’re sure that this year’s Ball Pig, Mud Grant, has what it takes to live up to that legacy.

In addition to that display (behind home plate on the third-base side), you can walk down the line to the hot corner (or, home-to-third, for the “No More Sports Questions” crowd) and find the City of Baseball Museum. You can find out quite a bit about their exhibits online, but nothing beats going there in person and seeing all the memorabilia and history for yourself. Plus, there’s a picture of a Ball Pig wearing Zubaz, which are two things near and dear to the heart of TonySPN.

If you’re able to engage with one of the knowledgeable members of the museum staff and have them show you around, even better. As informative as the plaques themselves are, the staff are able to flavor it with tidbits that fell on the cutting room floor.

For example, you might learn about Charlie Comiskey, the owner of the 1895 St. Paul Saints, from the display. If you’re a fan of early 20th-century scandals or perhaps Charlie Sheen’s more serious depictions of baseballers, you might even know that Comiskey was a legendary cheapskate who not only underpaid his players to an incredible degree, but then threw his players under the bus after the Black Sox Scandal. That’s right – we’re talking about the Chicago White Sox, the perpetual thorn in the Twins’ side. That was Comiskey, who moved the Saints to Chicago. What an awful person!

But the displays or your background knowledge might not have communicated how important Comiskey was to baseball’s history… as a player, not an owner. Comiskey was a first baseman, and his contribution to the game is so ubiquitous today that you’d never even think someone had to come up with the idea in the first place.

What was it? Before Comiskey, first (and third) basemen played the position standing on the bag. He was (according to many) the first guy to figure out that you can cover more ground and get to more ground balls by standing away from the base. Again, such a simple revolution to the game, but the first 20 years or so of baseball went by without anyone else figuring it out.

You also get to see the history of the rivalry between the Saints (then re-formed as a minor league affiliate to the Brooklyn!!! and Los Angeles Dodgers) and the Minneapolis Millers, who spent most of that time as the New York (not San Francisco!!!) Giants affiliate, before a short stint as the Boston Red Sox’s AA squad.

You might not think of Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Willie Mays, Felipe Alou, Ted Williams, and Carl Yastrzemski as being associated with Minnesota, but they were! If you were in Minneapolis in 1957, for example, you could watch a 20-year-old “Say Hey Kid” hit for a .477 batting average for 35 games, including 18 doubles, three triples, and eight homers!

It was a peak time to be a Twin Cities baseball fan, as fans could witness a “Streetcar Series” – that is, a double-header between these rivals with one game in St. Paul, and another in Minneapolis.

One of the coolest stories in St. Paul baseball history belongs to Toni Stone, who has an exhibit dedicated to her career. At a time when Black players were still in the struggle for integration in baseball, being a woman meant that Stone faced an even greater barrier to the game she loved than most of her contemporaries.

Stone was born in West Virginia, but from the age of 10 grew up in Rondo, a historically Black neighborhood of St. Paul that was largely destroyed with the construction of I-94. She excelled at baseball and couldn’t be deterred from playing. Her mother tried pushing her into figure skating, the coach of her boys’ baseball team was so disinterested in coaching her that she learned the game by reading the rules, and she was turned down by Saints manager Gabby Street multiple times before Street let Stone into his baseball school.

Stone’s skill was so great that, despite discrimination for being a woman at every level throughout her career, she caught on with the semi-pro Twin Cities Colored Giants team at age 16. She eventually became one of three women to be the first to play professional men’s baseball in the Negro Leagues.

Stone once told a sympathetic teammate, “When you finish high school, they tell a boy to go out and see the world. What do they tell a girl? They tell her to go next door and marry the boy that their families picked out for her. It wasn’t right. A woman can do many things.” And she did, she saw the world, and she did many things.

Stone passed away in 1996, but her legacy still lives on, if you know where to look. Her story is included in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and she is inducted in the Women’s Sports Hall of Fame, both the U.S.-focused and international ones. You can find her impact locally, as people still play games at Toni Stone Field on Marshall Ave. March 6 is even Toni Stone Day in St. Paul.

What else might you uncover about St. Paul baseball history? Check out the City of Baseball Museum and let us know.