Ted Radcliffe
American baseball player-manager
Theodore Roosevelt “Double Duty” Radcliffe (July 7, 1902 – August 11, 2005 (aged 103)) was a professional baseball player in the Negro leagues. He is one of only a handful of professional baseball players who lived past their 100th birthdays. Playing for more than 30 teams, Radcliffe, according to one biographer, 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 became a popular ambassador for the game. At his death he was thought to be the oldest living professional baseball player, but it was later discovered that Silas Simmons was born seven years earlier in 1895.
Damon Runyon coined the nickname “Double Duty” because Radcliffe played as a catcher and as a pitcher in the successive games of a 1932 Negro League World Seriesdoubleheader between the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Monroe Monarchs. 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. The Crawfords beat the Monarchs 5–1 in the best-of-nine series
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