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Elected to Major
League Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.
IN the Negro Leagues as they call it, Josh Gibson was generally
considered one of the best power hitters in the history of professional baseball. He led the Nergro Leagues home runes for 10 full
years in 1931.
Hitting home runs of more than 500 feet was not unusual for Gibson.
One home run was measured up to 575 feet. The Sporting News of June 3,
1967 credits Gibson with a home run in a Negro League game at Yankee
Stadium that struck two feet from the top of the wall circling the
center
field bleachers, about 580 feet from home plate.
Although it has never been conclusively proven, Chicago American Giants
infielder Jack Marshall said Gibson slugged one over the third deck
next to the left field bullpen in 1934 for the only fair ball hit out of the
House That Ruth Built.
Even his death has been clouded with myth. Gibson, it was said,
believed
he was going to die and gathered his family around
his
bedside. He even
sent his brother out to gather up his trophies. While talking and
laughing he supposedly raised his head, spoke incoherently, then lay down and died. The true story was not as sentimental or dramatic.
Gibson
suffered a stroke in a movie theater and was taken unconscious to his
mother's house where he died a few hours later.
Played For: Pittsburgh Crawford’s (1930-1937), Homestead Grays
(1937-1946)
Primary Team: Homestead Grays
A strong and agile catcher at 6' 1", 215 pounds, Gibson was the Negro
Leagues' greatest home run hitter and one of the most feared sluggers
of
any era. Called by many "the black Babe Ruth," the serious,
dour-faced
Gibson used a short, compact stride and a massive upper body to crush
line drive home runs in ballparks all over North and
Here are some quotes on what others think of Josh Gibson. "There is a
catcher that any big league club would love. His name is Gibson...he
can
do everything. He hits the ball a mile. And he catches so easy he might
as well be in a rocking chair. Throws like a rifle. Too bad this Gibson
is a colored fellow."
Mention most icons of the Negro Leagues and the burning issue is how baseball's color line denied them acknowledgment alongside their Major League peers. But Josh Gibson paid a steeper price: Recognition as perhaps the greatest player of all time.
The Georgia-born, Pittsburgh-reared muscular catcher was that good.
His
drives were that majestic. His arm was that strong, his legs that fleet.
The numbers Gibson posted as the mainstay, alternately, of both the Pittsburgh Crawford’s and Homestead Grays read like fiction: a .354 average and 962 homers throughout a 17-season career, with single-season highs of .517 and 84. Even conceding the unreliability of stat-keeping in the Negro Leagues, many of those numbers are corroborated by the official Baseball Encyclopedia.
Indelible impressions on
everyone who saw him play. Negro Leaguers who
played with and against him from 1929 through 1946 revered him. Big
leaguers
who tried to get him out -- and there were many, as postseason
barnstorming series between Major and Negro Leaguers were big
attractions, and
Gibson hit a collective .412 in these games -- were awed by him.
"I played with Willie Mays and against Hank Aaron," Monte Irvin once said. "They were tremendous players, but they were no Josh Gibson. You saw him hit, and you took your hat off.
"It makes me sad to talk about Josh, because he didn't get to play in the Major Leagues, and when you tell people how great he was, they think you're exaggerating."
In an allegorical sense, the color line was drawn right at Gibson's feet. In the early '40s, Dodgers Manager Leo Drencher was reprimanded by Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis for musing about how nice it would be to be able to jot Gibson's name on his lineup card. According to hearsay, Pittsburgh Pirates owner Bill Benswanger actually signed Gibson to a Major League contract in 1943 that was vetoed by Landis.
But while Gibson couldn't play in the Major Leagues, he could play
in Major
League parks, and the big houses nurtured his legend. He preceded
Mickey Mantle
as the only two men to smoke a ball out of Griffith Stadium in
Gibson, himself, always pooh-poohed the notion he'd actually hit a ball out of The House that Ruth Built, maintaining that he'd only reached the center-field bullpen. He was a modest man and a playful one. Gibson would needle opposing hitters by throwing fistfuls of dirt on their shoes, and goad pitchers by rolling up his sleeves to make his biceps bulge
Mostly, though, Gibson was a sad man, going through a short life
under the
weight of many burdens. The padlocked Majors
weren’t even
the heaviest.
Gibson never fully recovered from an early-career trauma, the death in 1920 of his 17-year-old wife Helen while giving birth to his twin children. Unable to bear the haunting memory of Helen he saw in the twins, he left them in the care of his in-laws and tried to lose himself in baseball, and in an out-of-control lifestyle away from the diamond.
But through the binges and the dry-outs, and despite ailing knees that had kept him out of World War II service, Gibson kept hitting the covers off the ball.
In 1943, the source of recurring headaches was diagnosed as a brain tumor. Gibson understood the gravity of that condition, but didn't flinch.
"Death isn’t anything," he said. "You can't tell me anything about death. Death isn’t anything but a fastball on the outside corner."
On a January evening four years later, having sought refuge from the pounding in his head in a darkened movie theater, Gibson was found unconscious in his seat when the lights came on. He was taken to his mother's house, where he passed away early the next morning -- at 35 -- three months before Jackie Robinson kicked down the door to the Majors.
For nearly three decades, he lay in an unmarked grave in
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