Joe Williams Marquee Hall of Fame 1999

The four counted seasons, between 1923 and 1932, have him at 17-19 with 202 strikeouts, and he was thirty-seven when the first of them began. The sixteen before, from 1910, hold 92 wins against 40 losses and 831 strikeouts across 153 recorded games, and are not counted, because the Negro National League did not open until he was thirty-three.

He was Texan, part Comanche, and threw very hard; the nickname was Cyclone, later Smokey Joe. He beat major-league clubs in exhibitions often enough that the results were reported, though the archive does not hold them.

In 1952 a poll of Black sportswriters named him the best pitcher in Negro Leagues history, ahead of Satchel Paige. He appeared on twelve Hall of Fame ballots between 1978 and 1999, and the Veterans Committee elected him in the last of them, forty-eight years after he died.