Opinion: Josh Gibson was a legend who died at 35. He deserves to be a household name

Editor’s Note: Gene Seymour is a critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post. Follow him on X @GeneSeymour. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion on CNN.

When something totally, almost uniquely unexpected happens in the sports industrial complex, hyperbolic scribes often like to invoke improbable metaphors to characterize the utter improbability of it all.

You know: Pigs can fly! Republicans are liberal again! The Detroit Lions are going to the Super Bowl! Stuff like that.

Well, one is tempted towards similar effusions when greeting this week’s announcement from the stat keepers with Major League Baseball (MLB): Josh Gibson, one of the greatest hitters in Negro League history, is now baseball’s all-time batting champion, with his career .372 average, beating out Ty Cobb’s lifetime .367.

This ascension came with Tuesday’s announcement by MLB officials that player statistics with the Negro Leagues would be incorporated into baseball’s record books three years after a 17-member committee of historians, statisticians and other experts was formed to, in MLB’s words, correct a “longtime oversight.”

Major League Baseball has for decades been trying to reconcile its history with that of the Negro Leagues, which on the one hand provided a haven for some of the 20th century’s greatest American athletes to earn money playing a sport America loved while on the other signified the total illogic of legally sanctioned racial segregation. As Black superstars helped the game grow and evolve since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, the more people began wondering whether it was just or even accurate to say that White baseball greats of the early 20th century – from Walter Johnson to Babe Ruth to Lou Gehrig to Joe DiMaggio – were greater players than Gibson, Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard and other Negro Legends whose gifts have received greater acknowledgment since integration took effect.

Now, at last, you really can, as the saying goes, look it up.

Gibson (1911-1947) was a catcher with the Negro Leagues during the racially segregated 1930s and 1940s, playing most of his career with the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays. He was so legendary for his batting prowess that he was billed “the Black Babe Ruth,” though others, Black and White, who had seen him play said perhaps Ruth should have more properly been labeled “the White Josh Gibson.”

Gibson was one of more than 2,300 players from the Negro Leagues whose stats were assembled and are now incorporated into official MLB history. The committee also determined that his single season batting average of .466 for the 1943 Homestead Grays was the new standard for such percentages. Gibson was also acknowledged as the career leader in slugging percentage (.718) and OPS (on-base-plus-slugging) percentage (1.177), beating Ruth’s .690 and 1.164 respectively.

For generations of baseball aficionados, especially African Americans, it’s somewhat breathtaking to wake up in a world where Gibson, whose untimely death at 35 from a stroke was also attributed by friends and colleagues to a heart broken from being prohibited by racism from showing what he could do in the big leagues, could now be officially considered the Best Ever To Play The Game.

But in baseball, the arguments (call them conversations if it makes you feel better) will continue. Sure, Gibson was at least Ruth’s equal as a slugger. But Ruth was, early in his career, such a pitching prodigy that if his career had ended in 1919 before he was notoriously sold by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees, he would still have been a Hall of Famer.

Cobb’s partisans, as usual, will tirelessly defend their man’s preeminence. One could imagine Cobb’s ghost being incensed, given his reputation for having a ferocious temper and a bigoted attitude towards Black people, though the more extreme examples of his alleged racism have been challenged by contemporary historians to the extent that one now wonders whether Cobb would have been, in the end, as awed by Gibson’s prodigious gifts as those who saw them displayed.

Because if there’s an article of faith that the Church of Baseball holds more dearly than any other, it’s fairness. And this abiding devotion, whether applied to an umpire’s blown call or decades of injustice, manifests itself in many ways.

Consider, for instance, that Gibson’s jaw-dropping .466 season of 1943 came two years after the incomparable Ted Williams’ magical 1941 season when he batted .406, the last time any major league player crossed the .400 barrier.

Few players were as covetous towards their achievements or their craft as Williams, who was also a keen scholar of baseball history. So much so that at his own Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1966, Williams devoted part of his acceptance speech to encourage Cooperstown to devote its space to honor Negro League players like Gibson, Satchel Paige, Buck Leonard and others who “are not here only because they were not given a chance.”

You think Teddy Ballgame would have minded if Josh Gibson’s 1943 season average eclipses his 1941 stats? If so, then you don’t know who Williams was. Nor do you know baseball – or what it really means to play fair.