"proposal by Coulliard 

I'm going on the soapbox for awhile, an uncomfortable position in a baseball game (sliding runners tend to knock it out from under you).  I want to explain my position without us getting personal.  If you take offense, apologies in advance.  And apologies for being so wordy.  Genetic defect.

I am a baseball researcher by hobby (computer programmer by trade), and I take everything about baseball's history seriously, especially the Negro Leagues, which have become my area of expertise.  Segregation in Baseball remains the absolute worst scar on its face.

In my opinion (emphasis on it being my opinion), Josh Gibson, Pete Hill, Satchel Paige, Bullet Rogan, Oscar Charleston, Andy Cooper, José Méndez, Cristobal Torrienté, and many others men would have easily been Hall of Famers long, long ago had it not been for segregation.  It's my belief that given current evidence Gibson wouldn't have hit much more than 500 or so home runs playing a full schedule, given the HR rates of the 30s and 40s (not nearly as high as today), given his truncated career (he died after his 17th season), and given the position he played (catchers just don't play full schedules because of the extreme wear and tear; on the other hand, he might have been converted into an outfielder or first baseman in an integrated Majors, and 600+ would have been a possibility.

Babe Ruth hit 714 Major League HRs; had he had to face Bullet Rogan, Andy Cooper, Satchel Paige, and other pitchers of color, his totals might have tailed down toward 650 or so, and that in a 22-year career compared to Gibson's 17.

What we know is that Gibson is credited with 115 verifiable HR in Negro League play, plus 44 in Mexican League play, which was a bit lower level competition than MLB.  Gibson hit .359 against Negro League competition, which would be second highest of all time (behind Cobb) had he done so in an integrated majors, and Cobb's .366 might have lost a few points as well had he had to face Negro pitchers like Lefty Cooper and Willie Foster.

The raw numbers are still small.  We can't do anything about that.  115 compares very badly to 714, much less 762.  But it's still important to know those numbers, because it's what he did against major league-level competition.  What he did against amateur and semi-pro competition in exhibition games is fun to know (if we truly did know), but it is not the true measure of his worth, and (IMO) it insults the man's memory to artificially pad his numbers.  Understanding that Babe Ruth hit HIS home runs in a league that played 154 games per season, that homers were easier to hit in Ruth's league than Gibson's (livelier baseballs in the AL), the relative numbers make Gibson look like Ruth's peer.

With few exceptions, there are no researchers who do not believe that Josh Gibson was one of the two or three best pure power hitters in the game, and no exceptions among serious Negro League researchers.  We can (and in fact should) report that there have been various reports of his accomplishments in earlier days, but these numbers, taken without any context present a superman as unbelievable as that X-Files episode (""The Unnatural"").

You have to trust that the reason for putting up Gibson's reduced stats has a noble purpose.  Telling people that Gibson hit 800+ HR and batted .384 against all levels of competition tells nothing really, because he could have in reality hit .200 with no HR against top-level Negro League teams, but fattened up by counting 1,000 games against Little League comptetition.  Telling them he hit .359 and had a home run every sixteen at bats in a career that included many games in Griffith Stadium tells them something of importance  it gives us an excellent clue as to how he would have hit in the Majors, had he been allowed to play.

The ""nearly 800"" and ""962"" numbers give us no way of being able to separate them and understand their meaning.  An official scorer counted every one of Babe Ruth's HR in his major league career, and we can go back to sources from that day and find it.  In Gibson's case, someone reported (sometimes months later) numbers that no one even at that time could verify, because a lot of the numbers were based on hearsay, and some were just plain made-up.  We can't tell how many he hit over a 150-foot fence against a 17-year-old kid with a 60 MPH fastball, because we can't separate them.

There's plenty of space on the internet for repeating urban legend as fact.  Wikipedia should not be one of them.

My proposal is that we rewrite the article to include the latest official numbers, and make sure it is understood why Gibson only managed to play 510 Negro League games in his career.  It will inclu