As Bob Kendrick, president of the Kansas City-based Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, tells it, baseball’s all-time hit king had eyes like Ted Williams and power like Babe Ruth.
“For me, his greatest feat of all is hitting a ball into the right-field upper deck at Yankee Stadium,” says Kendrick. “They say he was circling the bases and just giggling. He was the kind of guy who was so strong that he could poke you in the arm and it would hurt, but he didn’t know he was hurting you.”
The indomitable Josh Gibson, nicknamed the Black Babe Ruth, managed all this while swinging a bat that measured 40 ounces and 41 inches – about 25% bigger than today’s big leagues bats. “You got to be a man,” adds Kendrick, “to swing that kind of lumber.”
Officially, Gibson is now the man, after Major League Baseball announced the incorporation of records from the Negro Leagues, even though he never had an at-bat in the majors. The decision late last month to include more than 2,300 players followed a three-year research project, led by a special committee of Negro Leagues experts and statisticians.
Related: Willie Mays, baseball’s towering legend and all-time Giants great, dies aged 93
MLB’s new stats database will formally launch before a special tribute game between the St Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants on Thursday at Alabama’s Rickwood Field, home to the Birmingham Black Barons, the team that launched Willie Mays, perhaps the finest player to ever pick up a bat and glove. Until his death on Tuesday at age 93, Mays – AKA the “Say Hey Kid” – was one of three surviving Negro Leagues players and baseball’s oldest living Hall of Famer. MLB had already planned to pay special tribute Mays at a Negro Leagues commemorative game in absentia.
MLB’s statistical integration rights a wrong that had endured since Major League Baseball accepted Black players into its ranks in 1947, precipitating the Negro Leagues’ slow death the next year. Why it took nearly 80 years to integrate the stats is a matter of ongoing controversy, with critics accusing MLB of going woke, and some Black baseball fans feeling it all comes far too late in the day. Nevertheless, 77 years since he last swung his bat, Gibson, an imposing catcher and slugger once relegated to the shadows, now stands above the rest.
A gentle giant who loomed large behind the plate, whether crouched in front of the umpire or rolling up his…