Joe Bauman and Josh Gibson: Real-life inspirations for Josh Exley

Upon viewing and reviewing the X-Files season six episode, “The Unnatural,” BuckBokai thought it only right to give a couple of baseball history’s more unfortunately obscure names their due: Namely, Joe Bauman and Josh Gibson.

The protagonist of the X-Files episode is one Josh Exley, a player for the Negro League’s “Roswell Grays” in 1947. The “Roswell” bit recalls Bauman, a longtime minor-league player in the lower minor-league levels for teams in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. In a career interrupted by World War II, Bauman became a local attraction known for jacking long home runs wherever he played.

But 1954 was something special for baseball fans, if only the truly arcane-loving. Playing for the Roswell Rockets, Bauman torched extant home run records when he hit 72 dingers to go with a .400 batting average, 150 walks and an unbelievable 228 RBIs – in 138 games. Bauman’s homer mark stood for 47 years, until Barry Bonds topped it in 2001. Bauman, still living in Roswell, was quoted as saying that he never “thought it’d last this long, to be honest. I was watching on TV when [Bonds] hit that last one. It didn’t bother me or anything.”

Bauman’s gaudy numbers aside, David Duchovny’s main inspiration for Exley was clearly his namesake Josh Gibson, quite possibly the greatest catcher of all-time, though few baseball fans even speculate such.

Gibson was unfortunate enough to enjoy an amazing career that spanned from 1930 to 1946: That’s right, one year before Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Gibson in fact died in 1947 at just 35 years old of a brain tumor with which he played through for three years (even earning two Negro League all-star bids) and lived through for four.

The statistics on Gibson are gaudy, even with the exaggeration of folkspeak and history. The Baseball Hall of Fame has his lifetime batting average, based on play with the Pittsburgh Crawfords, Homestead Grays and in the Mexican Leagues, is .359 and the Cooperstown staff credits him with “almost 800” home runs. Japanese professional baseball officially recognizes an even 800 Gibson homers. The round number implies that Gibson averaged some 47 round-trippers through his career.

Lawrence D. Hogan and Jules Tygiel’s Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African-American Baseball asserts Gibson hit .467 with 55 homers in 1933, and his fabled 1934 season saw him hitting 80 total home runs against Negro League and other competition.

The demise of the Negro Leagues following Robinson’s entry into the National League plus poor recordkeeping has proven unfair to Gibson historically. A shame it is that his greatness has faded in the march of time…

• Recommend on Facebook
• Tweet about it
• Tell a friend
• Print for later