It seemed Josh hit best against the best, against tough Negro-league pitchers who faced him down and made him hit what they had. His tremendous home run in Yankee Stadium against the Lincoln Giants in September 1930, only months after he had joined the Grays at age eighteen, came during the heat of a tough series against Cornelius "Connie" Rector, one of the best Negro-league pitchers of the time. Cum Posey considered it one of the greatest hits of Josh's career, and one which came under enormous pressure.

Yankee Stadium, "the House That Ruth Built," brought out the best in Josh whenever he set foot inside the park. Against the New York Black Yankees (oddly enough, one of Negro baseball's weaker franchises through the years, even though it potentially had one of the biggest followings), Josh hit three homers one Sunday afternoon in the early 1930s. One of them, as Black Yankee shortstop Bill Yancey remembers, was another of Josh's unforgettable "quick" home runs. "He walloped three that day and one of them was the quickest home run I ever saw. It was out of the park before the outfielders could turn their heads to watch it. It landed behind the Yankee Stadium bullpen, some five hundred feet away. He didn't loft it, he shot it out of there."

Another of his Yankee Stadium clouts went to right field, landing in Tier 26. By all accounts, that was six tiers farther than one hit by Jimmie Foxx, a drive at that time considered the longest ever hit in those seats.

Other major-league parks were comparably assaulted. Cum Posey considered a Gibson home run to straightaway center field in Pittsburgh's Forbes Field as the longest ever hit there. Posey insisted that only Josh and John Beckwith, an awesome power hitter with a variety of teams in the 1920s, had ever popped one over that fence. One of Josh's blasts over the right-field wall in Cincinnati's Crosley Field was considered one of the longest ever hit there, and similarly branded was a home run in Cleveland's Municipal Stadium.

In Washington's Griffith Stadium, a ball park in which Josh played many games later in his career, his home-run totals rivaled those of the entire major-league Washington Senator squad. That stadium was lined with twenty-foot-high walls covered with advertising. Once Josh hit a line drive against the right-field fence which slammed into a hot-dog sign, knocking paint and dust everywhere. A fan quickly yelled, "B'gosh! Josh knocked the mustard off that dog!"

Less remembered are the countless home runs Josh hit in small-town ball parks against semipro teams. He hit four homers in four at bats one day in Zanesville, Ohio. He hit three straight in Fairmont, West Virginia. And there was the mayor of Monessen, Pennsylvania, with his tape measure. That was an event like one on an afternoon in San Juan, Puerto Rico. That day Josh was playing in a stadium located next to a prison. He hit one over two fences -- the ball park's and the prison's -- narrowly missing inmates standing 525 feet away from home plate.

It was home runs like those, most of them unrecorded and untotaled, which comprised much of Josh's record. Many observers believed the total to be more than a thousand in all, a believable count in view of the number of games Josh played, but one impossible to verify.

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