Ted Radcliffe

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.