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PITTSBURGH The Pirates have played in the National League since 1887. They took part in the first World Series, as well as the first baseball game broadcast on the radio. They can claim five World Series championships, and some of Major League Baseball’s greatest players proudly wore a Pirates uniform.
The full history of professional baseball in Pittsburgh, however, includes far more than just the Pirates’ past. This city was once the center of Negro Leagues baseball.
One hundred years after the founding of the Negro National League, Major League Baseball officially acknowledged that the Negro Leagues’ segregation-era circuits were comparable in talent with its contemporary American and National Leagues. Calling it “long overdue recognition,” Commissioner Rob Manfred declared that seven professional Negro Leagues that operated between 1920 and 1948 and approximately 3,400 players along with them have received Major League status.
King of Sluggers: Josh Gibson’s Legacy
A century has passed since the founding of the Negro Leagues, and the great-grandson of the game’s most feared yet forgotten hitter is fighting for the recognition of Pittsburgh’s Black baseball history.
November 11, 2020
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY CHUCK BEARD
He has a set of hands that could wrap around the trunk of a Southern Live Oak the state tree of his native Georgia and a pair of forearms that could snap one in half.
It’s sometime in the 1930s in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh when he steps up to the plate and bashes a baseball that clears the ivy-veiled outfield walls of Forbes Field and soars into oblivion. The following day his Pittsburgh Crawfords are playing in Philadelphia, and from out of nowhere, a baseball falls from the heavens and lands into the glove of a surprised center fielder. The umpire points to the twenty-something kid named Josh Gibson and shouts, Yer out yesterday in Pittsburgh.
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