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- Биографические и автобиографические материалы, интервью, дневники, письма, научные и прочие статьи / 2000-02 Ruck Rob. Josh Gibson http://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-1900071 /

2000-02 Ruck Rob. Josh Gibson http://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-19000712000-02 Ruck Rob. Josh Gibson http://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-1900071



Gibson, Joshfree
(21 December 1911–20 January 1947)
Gibson, Josh (21 December 1911–20 January 1947), Negro League baseball player and Hall of Famer, was born Joshua Gibson in Buena Vista, Georgia, the son of sharecroppers Mark Gibson and Nancy Woodlock. The man that many call the greatest Negro League baseball player came north in 1924 after his father left sharecropping for work in a Pittsburgh steel mill. Josh came of age on Pittsburgh’s Northside, where he studied the electrical trade at Allegheny Pre-Vocational School and began playing for sandlot and semipro baseball clubs. After stints with the Gimbel Brothers and Westinghouse Airbrake company teams, he was recruited to catch for the Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1927. “The day I saw him,” Crawford captain Harold Tinker recalls, “I said ‘This boy is a marvel.’ Near the end of the game he hit a home run and hit the ball out of existence. They didn’t even go after it.”
The Crawfords were then made up of young black sandlot ballplayers, most of whom lived in the city’s Hill District. With the addition of Gibson, the Crawfords were ready to challenge Cumberland Posey’s Homestead Grays, a stellar aggregation of black pros from across the nation that made Homestead, a milltown near Pittsburgh, its home base. But by the 1929 season, Posey had persuaded Gibson to join the Grays as a salaried player.
In 1930, Gibson slugged what might have been the first ball ever hit over the center field fence in Forbes Field. The same year, he hit a home run that several observers said went out of Yankee Stadium. Although documentation for Negro League and independent baseball records is incomplete, Gibson is credited with 75 home runs in 1931 and 69 in 1934. Many of those were against semipro competition. Monte Irvin described Gibson as the “most imposing man I’ve ever seen as a hitter … very strong, broad shouldered, and happy go lucky. Confident. Knew he was good but he didn’t flaunt it. He just got out and did what he was supposed to do.”
After several seasons with the Grays, during which Gibson began to build his reputation as black baseball’s most feared hitter, the young catcher returned to the Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1934. By then, the Crawfords had left the sandlots behind as numbers baron Gus Greenlee took over the club and remade it into black baseball’s best team. Greenlee owned the Crawford Grill, a mecca for jazz aficionados and the hub of his many business enterprises. His revenues from numbers allowed Greenlee to add not only Gibson, but future Hall of Famers Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, Judy Johnson, and Cool Papa Bell to the Crawfords and to build Greenlee Field, the first black-owned stadium in the country. In 1933 he revived the Negro National League, which had collapsed in 1931.
Gibson and Paige composed what may have been baseball’s best battery, and the Crawfords, champions of the Negro National League in 1935, may well have been baseball’s best team ever. Monte Irvin called them black baseball’s equivalents of the 1927 New York Yankees.
In 1937, Gibson, Paige, Bell, and a handful of their teammates broke their contracts with the Crawfords to play for Ciudad Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. After leading Ciudad Trujillo, a club closely identified with dictator Rafael Trujillo, to the island’s summer championship and winning most of the season’s batting honors, Gibson returned to Pittsburgh.
Greenlee, whose Crawfords never recovered from the wholesale exodus of players, traded Gibson to the Homestead Grays. As Grays’ first baseman Buck Leonard said, “We just took off after that. He put new life into the whole team.” Leonard and Gibson were considered black baseball’s Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, and the Homestead Grays the Negro Leagues’ New York Yankees. After Gibson returned, the Grays won an unprecedented nine Negro League pennants in a row. Playing three times a week at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., during the late 1930s and World War II, in addition to their games in Pittsburgh, the Grays were rivaled by only the Kansas City Monarchs during this epoch.
The muscular 6′ 2″ Gibson began to put on weight during these years, but he remained a speedy base runner and a superb defensive catcher with what Monte Irvin calls “a rifle for an arm.” A perennial selection to the East-West all-star game, where he batted a cumulative .483 in nine games, Gibson was most remembered for his epic swings at the plate. The Pittsburgh Courier reported that Gibson made about $6,000 a season playing for the Grays during the 1940s, more than the major league minimum salary but far less than that of a comparable major league star, and he earned another $3,000 from winter baseball. Gibson hit home runs throughout the United States and the Caribbean basin, almost 800 in all, according to the Hall of Fame. Decades after his death, fans could still be found from Pittsburgh to Havana who attested that some ball that Gibson hit was the longest home run they ever saw.
Credited with a lifetime .362 batting average in Negro League and Caribbean play, the highest of any Negro Leaguer, Gibson won four Negro League batting titles, as well as batting championships, home run titles, and most valuable player awards in the Negro Leagues, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. He played virtually every winter somewhere in the Caribbean, and he also played in Mexico during the summers of 1940 and 1941 rather than with Homestead. While winning MVP honors in Puerto Rico in 1941, he hit .480. During all of his years in baseball, Gibson never played for a losing team.
While considered jovial and carefree by his teammates, Gibson, while still a teenager, encountered tragedy when his bride, Helen, died delivering their twin children, Helen and Josh, Jr., in 1930. He later became a heavy drinker and was occasionally hospitalized.
In October 1945, Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a contract with the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ leading farm club. Gibson responded with one of his best seasons ever in 1946, but received no offers to join Robinson in “white” baseball. In 1947, the year that Robinson debuted with the Dodgers, Gibson died, possibly from a stroke, in Pittsburgh. The cause of his death remains uncertain, although a brain tumor and possible drug use have been alleged as contributing factors. The Pittsburgh Courier reported: “The exact nature of his illness is still shrouded in mystery, but it is generally believed to have been the result of a ‘rundown condition.’ ”
“All he needed was the chance to do it in the majors,” teammate Harold Tinker argued, “and he would have been something.” It is unlikely that any who saw him play would disagree.
“Josh Gibson was the black Babe Ruth,” remembered fellow Hall of Famer Monte Irvin. “All the black players will tell you that Josh was our best. He was our best hitter, our best all-around player … , but he died without feeling the thrill of playing in the major leagues.”
In 1972, Gibson was elected to the Hall of Fame, the second Negro Leaguer chosen.

Bibliography

The best biography of Gibson is John B. Holway, Josh and Satch: The Life and Times of Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige (1991). See also William Brashler, Josh Gibson: A Life in the Negro Leagues (1978), and Rob Ruck, Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh (1987).

See also

Related articles in Companion to United States History on Oxford Reference

Gibson, Joshfree
(21 December 1911–20 January 1947)
Gibson, Josh (21 December 1911–20 January 1947), Negro League baseball player and Hall of Famer, was born Joshua Gibson in Buena Vista, Georgia, the son of sharecroppers Mark Gibson and Nancy Woodlock. The man that many call the greatest Negro League baseball player came north in 1924 after his father left sharecropping for work in a Pittsburgh steel mill. Josh came of age on Pittsburgh’s Northside, where he studied the electrical trade at Allegheny Pre-Vocational School and began playing for sandlot and semipro baseball clubs. After stints with the Gimbel Brothers and Westinghouse Airbrake company teams, he was recruited to catch for the Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1927. “The day I saw him,” Crawford captain Harold Tinker recalls, “I said ‘This boy is a marvel.’ Near the end of the game he hit a home run and hit the ball out of existence. They didn’t even go after it.”
The Crawfords were then made up of young black sandlot ballplayers, most of whom lived in the city’s Hill District. With the addition of Gibson, the Crawfords were ready to challenge Cumberland Posey’s Homestead Grays, a stellar aggregation of black pros from across the nation that made Homestead, a milltown near Pittsburgh, its home base. But by the 1929 season, Posey had persuaded Gibson to join the Grays as a salaried player.
In 1930, Gibson slugged what might have been the first ball ever hit over the center field fence in Forbes Field. The same year, he hit a home run that several observers said went out of Yankee Stadium. Although documentation for Negro League and independent baseball records is incomplete, Gibson is credited with 75 home runs in 1931 and 69 in 1934. Many of those were against semipro competition. Monte Irvin described Gibson as the “most imposing man I’ve ever seen as a hitter … very strong, broad shouldered, and happy go lucky. Confident. Knew he was good but he didn’t flaunt it. He just got out and did what he was supposed to do.”
After several seasons with the Grays, during which Gibson began to build his reputation as black baseball’s most feared hitter, the young catcher returned to the Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1934. By then, the Crawfords had left the sandlots behind as numbers baron Gus Greenlee took over the club and remade it into black baseball’s best team. Greenlee owned the Crawford Grill, a mecca for jazz aficionados and the hub of his many business enterprises. His revenues from numbers allowed Greenlee to add not only Gibson, but future Hall of Famers Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, Judy Johnson, and Cool Papa Bell to the Crawfords and to build Greenlee Field, the first black-owned stadium in the country. In 1933 he revived the Negro National League, which had collapsed in 1931.
Gibson and Paige composed what may have been baseball’s best battery, and the Crawfords, champions of the Negro National League in 1935, may well have been baseball’s best team ever. Monte Irvin called them black baseball’s equivalents of the 1927 New York Yankees.
In 1937, Gibson, Paige, Bell, and a handful of their teammates broke their contracts with the Crawfords to play for Ciudad Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. After leading Ciudad Trujillo, a club closely identified with dictator Rafael Trujillo, to the island’s summer championship and winning most of the season’s batting honors, Gibson returned to Pittsburgh.
Greenlee, whose Crawfords never recovered from the wholesale exodus of players, traded Gibson to the Homestead Grays. As Grays’ first baseman Buck Leonard said, “We just took off after that. He put new life into the whole team.” Leonard and Gibson were considered black baseball’s Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, and the Homestead Grays the Negro Leagues’ New York Yankees. After Gibson returned, the Grays won an unprecedented nine Negro League pennants in a row. Playing three times a week at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., during the late 1930s and World War II, in addition to their games in Pittsburgh, the Grays were rivaled by only the Kansas City Monarchs during this epoch.
The muscular 6′ 2″ Gibson began to put on weight during these years, but he remained a speedy base runner and a superb defensive catcher with what Monte Irvin calls “a rifle for an arm.” A perennial selection to the East-West all-star game, where he batted a cumulative .483 in nine games, Gibson was most remembered for his epic swings at the plate. The Pittsburgh Courier reported that Gibson made about $6,000 a season playing for the Grays during the 1940s, more than the major league minimum salary but far less than that of a comparable major league star, and he earned another $3,000 from winter baseball. Gibson hit home runs throughout the United States and the Caribbean basin, almost 800 in all, according to the Hall of Fame. Decades after his death, fans could still be found from Pittsburgh to Havana who attested that some ball that Gibson hit was the longest home run they ever saw.
Credited with a lifetime .362 batting average in Negro League and Caribbean play, the highest of any Negro Leaguer, Gibson won four Negro League batting titles, as well as batting championships, home run titles, and most valuable player awards in the Negro Leagues, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. He played virtually every winter somewhere in the Caribbean, and he also played in Mexico during the summers of 1940 and 1941 rather than with Homestead. While winning MVP honors in Puerto Rico in 1941, he hit .480. During all of his years in baseball, Gibson never played for a losing team.
While considered jovial and carefree by his teammates, Gibson, while still a teenager, encountered tragedy when his bride, Helen, died delivering their twin children, Helen and Josh, Jr., in 1930. He later became a heavy drinker and was occasionally hospitalized.
In October 1945, Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a contract with the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ leading farm club. Gibson responded with one of his best seasons ever in 1946, but received no offers to join Robinson in “white” baseball. In 1947, the year that Robinson debuted with the Dodgers, Gibson died, possibly from a stroke, in Pittsburgh. The cause of his death remains uncertain, although a brain tumor and possible drug use have been alleged as contributing factors. The Pittsburgh Courier reported: “The exact nature of his illness is still shrouded in mystery, but it is generally believed to have been the result of a ‘rundown condition.’ ”
“All he needed was the chance to do it in the majors,” teammate Harold Tinker argued, “and he would have been something.” It is unlikely that any who saw him play would disagree.
“Josh Gibson was the black Babe Ruth,” remembered fellow Hall of Famer Monte Irvin. “All the black players will tell you that Josh was our best. He was our best hitter, our best all-around player … , but he died without feeling the thrill of playing in the major leagues.”
In 1972, Gibson was elected to the Hall of Fame, the second Negro Leaguer chosen.

Bibliography

The best biography of Gibson is John B. Holway, Josh and Satch: The Life and Times of Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige (1991). See also William Brashler, Josh Gibson: A Life in the Negro Leagues (1978), and Rob Ruck, Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh (1987).

See also

Related articles in Companion to United States History on Oxford Reference



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