proposal by Coulliard   Im 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 baseballs 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 Jos Mndez Cristobal Torrient and many others men would have easily been Hall of Famers long long ago had it not been for segregation  Its my belief that given current evidence Gibson wouldnt have hit much more than  or so home runs playing a full schedule given the HR rates of the s and s not nearly as high as today given his truncated career he died after his th season and given the position he played catchers just dont 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  would have been a possibility  Babe Ruth hit  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  or so and that in a year career compared to Gibsons   What we know is that Gibson is credited with  verifiable HR in Negro League play plus  in Mexican League play which was a bit lower level competition than MLB  Gibson hit  against Negro League competition which would be second highest of all time behind Cobb had he done so in an integrated majors and Cobbs  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 cant do anything about that   compares very badly to  much less   But its still important to know those numbers because its what he did against major leaguelevel competition  What he did against amateur and semipro 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 mans memory to artificially pad his numbers  Understanding that Babe Ruth hit HIS home runs in a league that played  games per season that homers were easier to hit in Ruths league than Gibsons livelier baseballs in the AL the relative numbers make Gibson look like Ruths 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 XFiles episode The Unnatural  You have to trust that the reason for putting up Gibsons reduced stats has a noble purpose  Telling people that Gibson hit  HR and batted  against all levels of competition tells nothing really because he could have in reality hit  with no HR against toplevel Negro League teams but fattened up by counting  games against Little League comptetition  Telling them he hit  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  and  numbers give us no way of being able to separate them and understand their meaning  An official scorer counted every one of Babe Ruths HR in his major league career and we can go back to sources from that day and find it  In Gibsons 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 madeup  We cant tell how many he hit over a foot fence against a yearold kid with a  MPH fastball because we cant separate them  Theres 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  Negro League games in his career  It will inclu