No Joshing About It: 62 Isn’t 84

One has to wonder what Josh Gibson would have thought about Mark McGwire.

Today, McGwire is the king of the home run after breaking major league baseball’s single-season record of 61, but in the late 1930s, Gibson put up numbers in the Negro leagues that even dwarfed McGwire’s.

In 1936, nine years after Babe Ruth had hit 60 home runs with the New York Yankees, Gibson hit 84 homers in 170 games for the Pittsburgh Crawfords, according to “The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Leagues.”

“[Josh Gibson] had the strength of two men,” said Hall of Famer Monte Irvin, who played with the New York Giants and Chicago Cubs. “The most imposing hitter ever.”

Gibson, inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972, played 17 seasons in the Negro leagues for the Homestead Grays and Crawfords and is credited with 962 home runs. McGwire has hit a home run every 7.3 at-bats this season; Gibson averaged a homer every 6.8 times up over his career.

Gibson, a right-handed-hitting catcher, never played in the majors because of the color barrier. “I think if he’d played in the majors, he’d have hit over .300 with 40 to 50 homers each year,” former Negro league ballplayer Sammy Haynes told the Cleveland Plain Dealer last year.

Gibson, a career .354 hitter, faced good pitching in the Negro leagues, though some games against nonleague teams were undocumented. From 1887 to 1947, Negro teams beat barnstorming white big leaguers 268 games to 168. In the 18 games that Gibson played against major leaguers, Gibson batted .412 and once hit two home runs in the same game off Dizzy Dean when he was in his prime.

Gibson’s power was the subject of many tales. One often-told story is that while playing for the Crawfords at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field in the 1930s, he hit a ball so high and far that no one saw it come down. The astonished umpire ruled Gibson’s blast a home run. The next day, when the Crawfords were playing in Philadelphia, a ball suddenly dropped out of the sky and was caught by the surprised center fielder. The umpire from the previous day pointed at Gibson and shouted, “You’re out!”

Gibson, who suffered a nervous breakdown in 1943, died in his sleep from a stroke on Jan. 20, 1947, at 35. Less than a month later, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball when he went to spring training with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

‘He wasn’t the same player from about 1943 on,” O’Neil said. “He certainly wasn’t depressed about not being in the majors. He had a great life.”