Jackie Robinson is famous for being a Hall of Fame baseball player but even more so for being the first black ballplayer to be signed to a major league team, the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. After Robinson, other clubs began signing black players as well, including eventually the St. Louis Cardinals.
This week’s Blast from the Past looks at the brief baseball career of St. Louis’ groundbreaker, Tom Alston, signed in 1954 to play first base. While important in Cardinals history, Alston’s heartbreaking story included poverty and mental illness.
Thomas Edison Alston was born to Shube and Anna Alston in Greensboro, North Carolina on January 31, 1926. Thomas was one of their seven children, five sons and two daughters. Young Tom developed his love for baseball both from reading stories in the newspapers his mother brought home from the houses she cleaned as a maid, and the broomstick bat and tennis ball games he played in his neighborhood. His high school, poor and segregated, had no baseball team.
Alston joined the Navy in 1944 and played baseball on organized teams there. After his return from the military, Tom attended North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College. During this time, Alston began playing on a traveling team called the Goshen Red Wings. He later joined the Jacksonville Eagles, managed by a former Negro Leagues pitcher named Chet Brewer.
Alston earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1951, and shortly thereafter went to play in Indian Head, Saskatchewan with several other Eagles players and the manager. His team won several Canadian tournaments.
Tom returned to organized baseball in the U.S. with the all-black Porterville Comets of the Southwestern International League in 1952. Alston hit .353 and was soon after signed by the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League.
At 6’5” and 200 pounds, Alston was a good defender at first base for San Diego, but his hitting was lacking. He batted only .244 in 1952, but manager Lefty O’Doul worked with him and saw improvement. In his first 50 games in 1953, Tom hit 15 home runs and had an average nearing .300. Issues with high fastballs and left handed pitching sent him into a slump mid-season, but he bounced back to finish the season batting .297/.353/.446 with 101 RBI in 180 games.
After playing winter ball in Mexico, Alston returned in January 1954 to a new team, as his contract was purchased by the St. Louis Cardinals. Alston was reportedly incredulous that he would be a teammate of Stan Musial.
The Cardinals were late to sign black players as owner Fred Saigh refused to act in the handful of years he owned the team following the signing of Robinson by the Dodgers. Further, the Cardinals were the last major league team to abolish segregated seating in their ballpark.
After August Busch Jr. bought the team in 1953, he ordered a scout to find some black players to sign. Busch was motivated by money rather than any liberal open-mindedness. He saw the opportunity of selling beer from his brewery to a larger segment of baseball fans and believed black faces on the team would draw more fans of all races.
Alston had a modest debut with the Cardinals in 1954, hitting .246 with four home runs and 34 RBI. The consensus was that Alston did not play well enough to justify the $100,000 the Cardinals paid for his contract. He began the 1954 season platooning at first base with Steve Bilko, the incumbent first baseman. In his first week, Alston hit two home runs, the second of which was a three-run game winner on April 18 against the Cubs. He began playing every day, and by the end of the month the Cardinals sold Bilko to the Cubs. Tom hit .442 in the next two weeks after Bilko was gone.
By June, Alston was slumping and the Cardinals sent him to Triple-A Rochester. That year, Tom began hearing voices and suffering periods of debilitating fatigue. He was treated for a thyroid ailment doctors thought caused his fatigue. He spent most of the next two seasons in the minor leagues, appearing in only 16 games with the Cardinals, 13 in 1955 and three in 1956.
During the 1956 offseason, after hitting .306 with Omaha, Tom started hearing the voices again. He made a suicide attempt with a razor blade to his wrist, but a law enforcement officer found him got ,him medical treatment, then sent him home.
Alston appeared in four games to begin the 1957 season, but his erratic behavior led the Cardinals to send him for medical attention. A doctor put him in the hospital for a “nervous condition” and he received shock treatments by a psychiatrist.
After returning to the team in September, he hit 4-for-13 in the next five games. Rather than stay in St. Louis to continue treatment, Tom decided to return home to live with his father. He never returned to play baseball.
In 1958, Alston was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon and spent 30 days in jail. Later that year he burned down a Methodist Church in Goshen, North Carolina. A judge ordered a psychiatric exam and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Tom spent the next eight years in a state mental hospital. He was released in 1967 but returned two months later after he set fire to his apartment. He was released a second time in 1969.
For the rest of his life, Alston took medication and visited mental health clinics to control his illness. He lived in poverty, subsisting on Social Security disability benefits because he could not hold down a job due to his erratic behavior, sometimes lucid, sometimes not.
Alston was living in a nursing home in 1990 when a visit by Joe Garagiola led to Tom being invited to throw out the first pitch in a game in June. He received a warm welcome from fans and the Cardinals arranged for him to earn some money at an autograph show.
Alston passed away from prostate cancer three years later, on December 30, 1993. His tombstone is decorated with the Cardinals’ Birds on the Bat logo.
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