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.
