Josh Gibson: The Home Run King Nobody Counted

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.

The League That Saved Itself: The Negro National League After Rube Foster

When Rube Foster suffered a mental breakdown in 1926 and was institutionalized, the Negro National League he had built from nothing lost the one man who had held it together by force of will. What happened next is less a story of collapse than a story of survival — and of what it takes to keep an institution alive when the person who made it work is no longer there.

Foster had been simultaneously president, arbiter, scheduler, banker, and disciplinarian of the league he’d founded in 1920. He had subsidized struggling franchises with his own money, resolved disputes through personal authority, and maintained the competitive balance that kept fans interested. Without him, the cracks that had always been present in the structure widened rapidly.

The Eastern Colored League, a rival circuit that had formed in 1923, competed with the NNL for players and fans. By 1928 the Eastern Colored League had folded. The NNL limped along until 1931, when the Great Depression delivered the blow that internal dysfunction had been setting up for five years.

The revival came in 1933, when Gus Greenlee, a Pittsburgh numbers operator with a genuine love of baseball, organized a second Negro National League. Greenlee built Greenlee Field with his own money, assembled the Pittsburgh Crawfords into one of the great teams of the era — Josh Gibson catching, Satchel Paige pitching, Judy Johnson at third base — and provided the organizational backbone the league needed.