In the summer of 1937, Josh Gibson hit a home run at Yankee Stadium that landed in the upper deck in left field — a distance that no one in the history of the ballpark, before or since, had reached. There were perhaps 6,000 people in the stands. The game was a Negro League contest. The achievement was not reported in the New York papers.
Gibson was born in 1911 in Buena Vista, Georgia. He was discovered at seventeen, catching for a semipro team, when the Pittsburgh Crawfords needed an emergency catcher during a game and pulled him from the stands. He was, by every account, an immediate and obvious natural talent.
His career statistics are both extraordinary and unreliable. Negro League record-keeping was inconsistent, and the records that do exist have been compiled by researchers working from newspaper box scores and surviving documents. What the research supports is a career home run total that probably exceeded Babe Ruth’s 714, a batting average that appears to have been above .350 for most of his career, and a reputation among contemporaries as the greatest hitter any of them had ever seen.
Walter Johnson said Gibson was worth $200,000 to any major league team. Dizzy Dean said Gibson could hit in any league in the world. Satchel Paige called him the greatest hitter he ever pitched to. Gibson never played in the major leagues. He suffered a brain tumor, experienced deterioration in his final years, and died of a stroke in January 1947 — three months before Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was thirty-five years old.
He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. His plaque calls him “possibly the greatest hitter in baseball history.” The hedge in “possibly” is necessary because nobody kept the records that would prove it. That absence of records is its own kind of testimony.
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