we ,ay mever know how good he really was but id bet he was still a great ball player, in one of his 1940 seasons he had rumord to have hit over an amazing 90 homers in 110 games and had batted over .450 those are some god like numbers heck if you hit on third of those homers in a season your a dangerous slugger

Accurate records or not, even if half of what they say about this guy is true he'd be the starter on my all time team. Ruthian power and apparently a student of the game at the highest level, a necessity to be a legenday catcher.

There's no tangible way of knowing how great he truly was, as league records from the segregated era are usually shadowy. Probably the most legendary position player of the Negro Leagues though, and his membership and that of other Negro League greats is deserved. I'm sure he would have been a big star had the utter embarassment and unfairness of baseball's racial segregation never existed or had been sweeped from the game before his time.

It would appear that Gibson was a very good player, being vouched for not only by many former Negro League opponents, but by more than a few white Major Leaguers who faced him in exhibition play. As tboneya observes, however, this does not constitute evidence that he was the greatest ever. An objective look at the Negro leagues shows that on AVERAGE, their talent was akin to that of a very high minor league. I stress the average because there were some superlative players, and Gibson was one of them, as was Bell, Paige and more than a few others. However, there were a fair number of players who were not major league calibre, and Gibson and others had ample opportunity to feast on them. It was a tragedy that baseball was not integrated in time for Gibson to perform in the major leagues, and I have no doubt that had that happened he would have been ranked among the top catchers. But it didn't happen, and any speculation about what might have been is simply speculation.