Ted Radcliffe

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Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe Ted Radcliffe (7 July 1902) is the oldest living professional baseball player.

Born Theodore Roosevelt Radcliffe in Mobile, Alabama, he became a star in the Negro Leagues. Playing for more than 30 teams, Radcliffe had more than 4,000 hits and 400 home runs, won about 500 games and had 4,000 strike-outs. He played as a pitcher and a catcher, became a manager and in his old age has become a popular ambassador for the game. He now lives in Chicago.

Damon Runyan coined the nickname “Double Duty” because Radcliffe played as a catcher and as a pitcher in the successive games of a 1932 Negro World Series doubleheader between the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Kansas City Monarchs. In the first of the two games at Yankee Stadium Radcliffe caught the pitcher Satchel Paige for a shut out and then pitched a shut out in the second game. Radcliffe considered his year with the 1932 Pittsburg Crawfords to be one of the highlights of his career. The Crawfords beat the Monarchs 5-1 in the nine-game series.

Double Duty pitched three and caught three of the six East-West All-Star games in which he played. He also pitched in two and caught in six other Negro League All-Star games. He hit .376 (11-for-29) in nine exhibition games against major leaguers, which gives some support to his grandiose claim to have been the greatest player of all time. A less partial assessment places him in the top twenty players.

Starting with the Detroit Stars in [1928] he went on to play for the St.Louis Stars (1930), Homestead Grays (1931), Pittsburgh Crawfords (1932), Columbus Blue Birds, New York Black Yankees, Brooklyn Eagles, Cincinnati Tigers, Memphis Red Sox, Birmingham Black Barons, Chicago American Giants, Louisville Buckeyes and Kansas City Monarchs. Ted Radcliffe managed the Cleveland Tigers in 1937, Memphis Red Sox in 1938 and the Chicago American Giants in 1943.

Standing 5'9" and weighing 210 pounds (95kg) Radcliffe had a strong throwing arm, good catching reflexes and great cunning. Even with these strengths, he also mastered many illegal pitches including the emery ball, the cut ball and the spitter. Statistics for the Negro League baseball are incomplete but those available for 8 of his 23 seasons show him hitting .273.

Ted Radcliffe grew up in Mobile, Alabama as one of ten children. His brother Alex Radcliffe also achieved renown as a ballplayer playing third base. The boys played baseball using a taped ball of rags with their friends including future Negro League All-Star ballplayers Leroy "Satchel" Paige and Bobby Robinson.

In 1919 as teenagers Ted and Alex hitchhiked north to Chicago to join an older brother and the rest of the family soon followed to live on the South Side of Chicago. In 1920 Ted Radcliffe signed on with the semi-pro Illinois Giants at $50 for every 15 games and 50¢ a day meal money. This worked out at about $100 a month. He travelled with the Giants for a few seasons before joining Gilkerson's Union Giants, another semi-pro team with whom he played until he joined the Detroit Stars in 1928 and entered the Negro National League.

With the Detroit Stars he was the regular catcher for the first half of the season, but when the pitching staff grew tired he began pitching and led the team to championship. His career best hitting average was .316 for the 1929 Detroit Stars.

Radcliffe believes the Homestead Grays 1931 team to be the greatest team of all time. The side included Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Jud Wilson, and Smokey Joe Williams. Gibson and Charleston joined him in the 1932 Pittsburg Crawfords. Radcliffe and his close friend Satchel Paige were easily persuaded to change sides by offers of higher earnings and both moved frequently. They also formed several Negro League all-star teams to play exhibition games against white major league stars. By the end of his career Double Duty had played for 30 different teams and in one season alone he played in 5 teams.

In 1934 Duty was player-manager of the integrated Jamestown Red Sox of North Dakota. He also played for the Chicago American Giants. After the season 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 was 2-1 when Foxx was hit on the head by a Chet Brewer pitch, and the tour cancelled.

In 1935 Duty and Satchel Paige led the Bismarck Churchills to the first National Semipro Championship. This North Dakota team was owned by Neil Churchill, a car dealer who funded an integrated team more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier in the Major League. Other Negro Leaguers on the team included Chet Brewer, Hilton Smith, Barney Morris and Quincy Trouppe.

In 1937 Radcliffe managed the Memphis Red Sox as well as catching and pitching for them. He stayed there for 1938 and in 1943 he became manager of the Chicago American Giants.

In 1943 aged 41 Duty won the Negro American League MVP award and two years later he struck a home run into the upper deck of Comiskey Park for the highlight of that season’s East-West All-Star game.

In 1945 Duty played for the Kansas City Monarchs and roomed with Jackie Robinson.

He integrated two semipro leagues, the Southern Minny (Minnesota) and the Michigan-Indiana League in 1948, by signing black and white players. Two years later in 1950 Radcliffe managed the Chicago Giants of the Negro American League. The team’s president, Dr. J.B. Martin, was concerned about black players being joining Major League teams so he instructed Radcliffe to sign white players. Radcliffe recruited at least five young white players (Lou Chirban, Lou Clarizio, Al Dubetts, Frank Dyall and Stanley Miarka).

In 1951 Duty became player-manager of the Elmwood Giants in the Manitoba-Dakota League where he batted .459 with a 3-0 pitching record and in 1952 at the age of 50 he batted .364 with a 1-0 pitching mark. A 1952 Pittsburgh Courier poll of Negro League experts named Double Duty the 5th greatest catcher in Negro League history and the 17th greatest pitcher. He retired two years later as a player-manager in Winnipeg, Canada. His peak earnings had been $850 a month.

In 1997 Radcliffe was inducted into the ‘Yesterday’s Negro League Baseball Players Wall of Fame’ at County Stadium in Milwaukee. And in 1999, aged 96, he became the oldest player to appear in a professional game when he threw a single pitch for the Schaumburg Flyers of the Northern League. Since his 100th birthday Double Duty has celebrated each year by throwing a ceremonial first pitch for the Chicago White Sox at Wrigley Field.

Radcliffe was known as a funny fast-talking player. Ty Cobb reported that as a catcher in an exhibition game he wore a chest protector that said "thou shalt not steal." He could call a clever game as a catcher and his banter from the pitching mound distracted some hitters. His biographer, Kyle P. McNary, estimates that Radcliffe had a .303 batting average, 4,000 hits and 400 homers in 36 years in the game.

McNary met Radcliffe in 1992 when he was trying to learn more about black baseball in his home town of Bismarck, North Dakota. Radcliffe subsequently suggested that McNary should write his biography and the result was self-published by McNary in 1994. Radcliffe would travel widely to ballgames and has become known for his lively good humour and gentle clowning.

Throughout his career Double Duty had to endure [[segregation]. In every city except St Paul, Minnesota he and his colleagues had to stay in segregated hotels, eat in segregated restaurants and had trouble getting cabs at night. He also faced racist hostility from players and has claimed that among others " [Ty] Cobb didn't like colored people".

Radcliffe’s stories are 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.

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

In 2005 an 8”x10” monochrome photograph or a baseball autographed by Ted Radcliffe can cost about $300.

Bibliography

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