Consecutive Negro National League pennants, 1937 to 1945, plus the Negro World Series in 1943 and 1944.
Where they played
The Grays came from Homestead, a steel town outside Pittsburgh. By the late thirties they were splitting home games between Pittsburgh and Griffith Stadium in Washington, renting the ground from the Senators.
On some weekends more people came to see the Grays than came to see the major league team whose stadium it was.
The two of them
Josh Gibson caught and hit. The numbers that survive are incomplete, because the leagues kept records unevenly and nobody outside them was keeping count, but the accounts of people who saw him are consistent.
Buck Leonard played first base and hit behind him. The press called them the thunder twins, and also the black Ruth and Gehrig, which tells you as much about the press as about the players.
1947
Gibson died on 20 January 1947, of a stroke, aged thirty five.
Jackie Robinson played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers on 15 April, three months later.
What integration cost
Once the major leagues began signing black players, the crowds that had sustained the Negro Leagues went to watch them there. The Negro National League folded in 1948.
The players who had been too old, or not signed, or already dead, simply disappeared from the record.
Seventy years
Major League Baseball did not recognise Negro Leagues statistics as major league records until December 2020. Gibson had been dead for seventy three years.