Even in a day without television, so many people saw him hit a baseball. Their descriptions do not vary much, only the details: the number of home runs, or the length of the drives, which fence each one cleared. The years have sweetened the memories, no doubt, the mixture of legend and myth growing stronger every day. Only the vision of how he did it, how he stood in the batter's box, gripped the bat, and connected with a fastball seems to have been etched in the minds of the witnesses.

RELATED LINKS » Josh Gibson Profile

One of the common criticisms of Negro baseball in the days of the color barrier was that it lacked technique. Not style, mind you, but textbook form for hitting, pitching, and fielding. It was true, perhaps, but laughably appropriate to how well the black ballplayers performed. So many of them were never taught the game by a competent coach. They learned it in a sandlot or by watching the older players, and they picked up bad habits and kept them until someone took the time to show them differently. Henry Aaron batted cross-handed for years until a coach told him about it. He hit some ferocious home runs that way, but he changed and found he could hit even more. Roy Campanella stepped back with his right foot just before swinging, a flaw called "stepping in the bucket," and even though he was coached on it he never really licked the tendency, but it never kept him from being one of the hardest-hitting catchers in the major leagues. Hundreds of other black players had "unacceptable" traits as hitters and fielders, from nervously twitching the bat before each pitch to catching flies by cupping their mitts at their belts, as Willie Mays so often did. But such things never really bothered anyone in the Negro leagues as long as a man could get the job done. Form was something the major leaguers could worry about, something white kids could spend hours fussing over. Blacks were too busy playing the game to pay much attention to it.

Oddly enough, Josh as a hitter was a model of textbook form. Nobody had ever taught it to him, and nobody ever tampered with it. His only defect was his stance: an upright, flat-footed posture, somewhat rigid, especially because he didn't stride much or bend his back and knees. Yet it didn't matter when he played for the Crawford Giants or during his first years with the Grays because he had such a tremendous eye, lightning reflexes, and an ability to get the bat on the ball.

It wasn't long, however, before he had perfected his batting style to the point where it became flawless. Josh's power came almost completely from strength above his waist: arms, shoulders, and back muscles so awesome that he didn't need the coiled power of his legs or the whiplike action of his wrists. With his upper-body power, he could thrash a ball with a motion much like that of beating a rug. He stood flat-footed, his heavy bat gripped down to the end and held high above his right shoulder, his feet spread fairly wide apart, and with the pitch he strode only slightly -- some say about four inches, some say not at all, but simply raised his foot and put it down in the same spot when the pitch came.

Such a batting stride is in drastic contrast to so many power hitters such as Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle, who took a long, perhaps twelve- to eighteen-inch stride and waded into a pitch with the commitment of the total body. Depending on the amount of talent involved, such a stride usually meant that a power hitter found himself off-balance when fooled by a pitch, or, when he connected, that his entire body met the ball and walloped it. Josh did no such thing. His short stride and massive strength seldom put him off-balance, seldom found him over-committed or unable to compensate when fooled by a pitch or when he had to reach for it. It also gave him a short swing, a limited arc of the bat that was concentrated in a smaller area than the wide, twisting, blustering swing of a Ruth or Mantle. Take many of the great long-ball hitters, from Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, and Mel Ott, to Willie Mays, Mantle, Willie McCovey, and Willie Stargell, and you see monstrous roundhouse swings that are ferocious and powerful and wonderful to watch when they connect and perhaps even more delightful when they miss. But with Josh (and some other power hitters, like Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, and, to some extent, Roger Maris), the swing was smaller, more condensed, more concentrated. The final result was just as productive as Ruth-style swings, but not nearly so picturesque. Josh was a treasure to watch when he connected, but not a spectacle when he struck out.

Josh patterned his style after Lou Gehrig of the Yankees, a player Josh felt was more polished in more techniques than any player at the time. When the Grays were in the vicinity of the Yankees during Gehrig's day, Josh made every effort to see him, something made more possible after 1930 when the Grays had some free afternoons before playing night games. He also greatly admired Jimmie Foxx, not only because Foxx was right-handed as Josh was, but also because the slugger was so friendly to blacks during the off-season. Foxx also was built much like Josh -- Foxx weighed 195 and stood six feet tall -- and was the premier home-run hitter in the majors in the 1930s when Ruth slowed down and finally retired. Almost from the beginning of Josh's pro career, he rolled up the short sleeves of his uniform, a move which showed off his massive biceps and which mimicked Foxx.

» NEXT