Theodore Roosevelt "Double Duty" Radcliffe (July 7, 1902 – August 11, 2005) was an American professional baseball player in the Negro leagues. An accomplished two-way player, he played as a pitcher and a catcher, became a manager, and in his old age became a popular ambassador for the game. He is one of only a handful of professional baseball players who lived past their 100th birthdays, next to Red Hoff (who lived to 107) and fellow Negro leaguer Silas Simmons (who lived to age 111).

Newspaperman Damon Runyon coined the nickname "Double Duty" because Radcliffe played as a catcher and as a pitcher in the successive games of a 1932 doubleheader between the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the New York Black Yankees. In the first of the two games at Yankee Stadium, Radcliffe caught the pitcher Satchel Paige for a shutout and then pitched a shutout in the second game. Runyon wrote that Radcliffe "was worth the price of two admissions." Radcliffe considered his year with the 1932 Pittsburgh Crawfords to be one of the highlights of his career.

Of the six East–West All-Star Games in which he played, Radcliffe pitched in three and was a catcher in three. He also pitched in two and caught in six other All-Star games. He hit .376 (11-for-29) in nine exhibition games against major leaguers. This made him the first black man to manage white professional players. He also played for the Chicago American Giants in that season. During that postseason, he managed a white semi-pro North Dakota team that toured Canada playing a major league all-star team gathered by Jimmie Foxx. Radcliffe's team won two games out of three before Foxx was hit on the head by a Chet Brewer pitch and the tour cancelled.

Segregation

Throughout his career, Double Duty had to endure racial segregation. In every city except Saint Paul, Minnesota, he and his colleagues had to stay in segregated hotels and eat in segregated restaurants. It was difficult to get cabs at night. He also faced racist hostility from players and has said that, among others, "Ty Cobb didn't like colored people". Radcliffe also recalled stopping the team car to buy gas in Waycross, Georgia. When the players tried to drink water from the car wash hose, the owner of the gas station told them, "Put that hose down—that's for white folks to drink." Radcliffe told a Boston Globe interviewer: "After that, I refused to buy gas from him. About four miles down the road, the gas ran out and we had to push the car five miles."

In 1997, Radcliffe was inducted into the "Yesterday's Negro League Baseball Players Wall of Fame" at County Stadium in Milwaukee. In 1999, aged 96, he became the oldest player to appear in a professional game just ahead of Buck O'Neil and Jim Eriotes. He threw a single pitch for the Schaumburg Flyers of the Northern League. After his 100th birthday, Double Duty celebrated each year by throwing a ceremonial first pitch for the Chicago White Sox at U.S. Cellular Field. On July 27, 2005, he threw the first pitch at Rickwood Field, Birmingham, Alabama. Two weeks later, Radcliffe died in Chicago on August 11, 2005, due to complications from cancer.

Radcliffe's stories were entertaining but not always reliable. His claim to have seen Fidel Castro with a cigar at a winter game in Cuba and his observation that the man "couldn't play" seems unlikely given that Castro would have been just 14 at the time.

Raelee Frazier cast Ted Radcliffe's twisted broken hands in bronze as part of the 2003 Hitters Hands series of baseball sculptures that toured the United States in Shades of Greatness, an exhibition sponsored by the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.

Bibliography

  • 'Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe', Jet, July 22, 1996
  • 'Still Loving Baseball At 100', Jet, (June 9, 2003)
  • 'Honoring Legends', Jet, July 28, 2003
  • 'Celebrating 102!', Jet, July 26, 2004
  • '2002 Hall of Fame Inductees', Illinois Department of Aging (2002). Retrieved July 24, 2005.
  • '"Double Duty" Knows Baseball' Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2003.
  • 'Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe', Negro League Baseball Players Association (2005)
  • 'Exciting to watch, Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe', The African America Registry (2005)
  • 'Double-Duty to throw out first pitch', Birmingham News, July 22, 2005. Retrieved July 24, 2005.
  • Blake, Mike. Baseball Chronicles, (Cincinnati, Oh: Betterway Books, 1994)
  • Bogira, Steve. 'Blackball: Memories of the Negro Leagues and Notes On the Integration, To Use the Term Loosely, of Major League Baseball', City Paper (Washington (DC)), July 24, 1987 (Vol. 7, Issue 30) pp. 12–24
  • Goldstein, Richard. 'Ted Radcliffe, Star of the Negro Leagues, Is Dead at 103', The New York Times (August 12, 2005)
  • Hershberger, Chuck. 'Baseball Book Review', Oldtyme Baseball News 1995 (Vol. 6, Issue 5) p. 28
  • Holway, John B. Voices From The Great Black Baseball Leagues (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1975) (Revised Edition published New York: Da Capo Press, 1992)
  • Larry Lester, Sammy J. Miller and Dick Clark, Black Baseball in Chicago, (Mount Pleasant, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2000)
  • McNary, Kyle P. Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe: 36 Years Of Pitching & Catching In Baseball's Negro Leagues (Minneapolis: McNary Publishing, 1994)
  • McNary, Kyle P. 'North Dakota Whips Big Leagues', Pitch Black Baseball (2001) Retrieved July 25, 2005.
  • McNary, Kyle P. 'Negro Leaguer of the Month, July, 2004', Pitch Black Baseball (July 2004)
  • Peterson, Robert W. Only The Ball Was White, (New York: Prentice-Hall Englewood-Cliffs, 1970)
  • Sepulveda, Lefty. 'Grateful Memories of Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe', Baseball Library (August 2, 2002)
  • Smith, Shelley. 'Remembering Their Game', Sports Illustrated, July 6, 1992 (Vol. 77, Issue 1) p. 80
  • Smith, Wendell. 'East-West Star Dust', Pittsburgh Courier, August 19, 1944
  • Steele, David. 'Negro Leaguers Seek Entry Into Hall', USA Today Baseball Weekly, August 16, 1991 (Vol. 1, Issue 20) p. 17

References

and Baseball-Reference Black Baseball and stats and Seamheads

  • Ted Radcliffe at SABR (Baseball BioProject)