Ted Williams Elected to the Hall and Josh Gibson Lost Forever

January 20 holds two Hall of Fame stories separated by 19 years and joined by a speech.

On this date in 1966, the BBWAA elected Ted Williams to the Baseball Hall of Fame with 93.4 percent of the vote, making him just the eighth player chosen in his first year on the ballot. Williams received 282 votes, the most in Hall of Fame history at that time. The last man to hit .400 in a season (.406 in 1941), Williams finished his career with a .344 batting average, 521 home runs, and a lifetime on-base percentage of .482 that remains the highest in major league history. He lost nearly five full seasons to military service in World War II and the Korean War.

During his induction speech that July, Williams used his platform to advocate for Negro Leagues players. "I hope that someday the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson and all the great Negro League players will be in the Hall of Fame," he said. Paige was inducted in 1971 and Gibson in 1972.

Gibson never lived to see any of it. On January 20, 1947, Josh Gibson died of a stroke in Pittsburgh at the age of 35. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1943 but refused surgery. Widely considered the greatest power hitter in Negro Leagues history, Gibson hit an estimated 800 home runs across his career with the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords. His death came just three months before Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, breaking the color barrier that had kept Gibson and hundreds of other Black players out of the major leagues.