Josh's overwhelming strength at the plate came from his batting eye and his bat control. Throughout his career he was always an "average" hitter, meaning that he hit for a high average as well as for home runs. Part of that success was due to his speed, but most of it was due to the fact that he hit the ball where it was pitched, and hit it hard. Most who played with Josh claim nobody hit the ball as hard as he did -- liners that tore the gloves off infielders, line drives that cracked against fences. His small stride made him a good curveball and change-up hitter. Josh quickly learned, according to teammate Buck Leonard, to bend his back when he went after curves, a technique essential to hitting the pitch, and had little trouble with them or other off-speed pitches. But he also hit pitches thrown all over the strike zone, a necessity in Negro leagues because umpires tended to call strikes on pitches ranging anywhere between the top of the shoulders and the knees. Major-league umpires through the years have restricted the strike zone to an area between the armpits and the top of the kneecaps.

Apart from his formidable strength and his near-perfect form, Josh had the awesome quality of courage that all good hitters must have if they are to survive. No one thing comes more into play in the battle between pitcher and hitter. It is a natural tendency for a batter to step away from something thrown at him, not stride into it. On the lowest levels of baseball, from Little Leaguers to semiprofessionals, it is not uncommon to see the majority of hitters stepping away from the ball, pulling the lead leg, the body, and the head away from the pitch for no other reason than the fact that a baseball is hard as a rock, is thrown at anywhere from forty to ninety miles an hour, and tends to hurt and hurt badly when it hits a bone. The step-away tendency is an understandable one, but close to poison for any aspiring hitter.

A pro is able to stride into the ball time after time, even after he has been dusted back or hit in the neck, and face off the pitcher with a bat that covers all parts of the strike zone. Josh, from the beginning of his career, could do it without flinching. When he became a premier slugger, he was thrown at more and more, for Negro leagues were freewheeling in every way, including the beanball, which was looked upon not as impolite or dirty but as a strategic weapon to be used against hitters like Josh who dug in and ruined you. Josh was thrown at and beaned often, but it never fazed him. Often, with two strikes and no balls as a count, he knew he was going to get a fastball sailing at his ear. He often bent down and picked up a handful of dirt and looked back at the pitcher as if to say that he knew what was coming and he'd been there before. Then the dustback pitch came, and Josh either hit the dirt or was hit in the head. But he got back up and hit as he always had, giving no pitcher a break, never showing a crack in the courage that he needed to hit the ball. To him and most other hitters in the league, it wasn't heroic, just something a good hitter had to do to stay on top. Josh stayed.

His home runs were most often long drives, deep, not necessarily high but often so; or quick, smashing blows that flew off the bat and rushed out of the stadium. They were, in every sense of the word, "Ruthian," for Babe's considerable strength made so many of his home runs tape-measure clouts. Yet to so many who saw the way Josh hit them day in and day out, they were "Gibsonian," with a power and velocity equal to anything Ruth ever hit. The most memorable were to dead center field, a mark of perfect contact between bat and ball at the precisely perfect instant. Yet he pulled as many to left, and nailed others into the right-field stands. Few people remember Josh's home runs as being restricted to any one field, and mention that they were similar only in the way they disappeared.

The stories go on and on. He hit so many, and so many saw them go. There are the tales about Josh hitting one out of sight on one afternoon only to have it reappear out of the sky the next day. Of course, the umpire said, "Yer out! Yesterday, in Pittsburgh!" And there are the less apocryphal stories of games being stopped in mid-inning so the home team could measure the blow. The mayor of Monessen, Pennsylvania, did it one day, arriving at a distance of 512 feet.

The most engaging stories are from teammates or opponents who remember what it was like to play with him each day, and who saw the best of the Negro leagues and the white leagues try to outfox him or fake him out, fool him or overpower him.

Jack Marshall, who played most of his career with Chicago's Negro teams but who hooked on with Josh during the off-season or south of the border, remembers not a home run but a line-drive single Josh hit in York, Pennsylvania, one day. It shot off his bat at shortstop Willie Wells, one of the Negro leagues' greatest shortstops, but Wells couldn't do anything with it. The ball hit Wells's glove so hard that it split the skin on his left hand. Wells, like most fielders of the era who wore compact, short-fingered gloves, caught most infield hits in the pocket of the glove and built up a tough, callused palm. But Josh's drive went through his glove and, said Marshall, "split the web of skin between his thumb and his first finger right apart."

Marshall also vividly remembers one of Josh's "quick" drives, one hit in Comiskey Park in Chicago. Comiskey was a major- league stadium with long fences, and its center-field wall was 435 feet from home plate. On it, about 8 feet off the ground, were loudspeakers facing toward the field and about 20 inches in diameter. Josh hit a drive to straightaway center that to Marshall never seemed to rise, staying instead on a straight line like a frozen rope. It struck a loudspeaker dead center and stuck in it like an apple. The game was stopped while a groundskeeper pried it free.

Jimmie Crutchfield played alongside Josh for five years and against him for many more, and he can think of countless times that Josh left everyone in the stands wide-eyed. Crutchfield remembers a game against the Nashville Elite Giants which was played in front of a big crowd, including a complete minor-league team who made the game just to see Josh perform. The Elite Giants' manager was Candy Jim Taylor, who said before the game that he know how to pitch Josh. Taylor insisted that Josh could not hit a sidewinder, a pitch fired from the third-base side of the mound. During a crucial time in the game, with Josh's team behind, Cool Papa Bell doubled, Crutchfield followed with a single, and Josh came up representing the go-ahead run. Taylor quickly stopped the game and went out to instruct his pitcher, Andrew Porter, to throw nothing but sidewinders. According to Crutchfield, Josh dug in at the plate and waited for his pitch. When he got it, a sidewinder coming at him and snaking for the outside of the plate, Josh stroked it. "I can see it now," said Jimmie. "It just went out of the park like the wind."

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