Double-duty feats a reminder Negro Leagues still overlooked
In Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago rests a headstone etched with the figure of a pitcher throwing a baseball to the figure of a catcher. The honoured deceased is Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe: Born July 7, 1902, died Aug. 11, 2005.
His parents didn’t nickname him Double Duty. The New York baseball columnist Damon Runyon did. Why?
During a 1932 doubleheader that pitted Radcliffe’s Pittsburgh Crawfords against the New York Black Yankees at Yankee Stadium,
Runyon witnessed Radcliffe hit a grand slam and catch Satchel Paige’s shutout in the twi-night opener, only to turn around and throw a shutout of his own in the second game.
The lore of Double Duty should be reincarnated with the rise of Shohei Ohtani, baseball’s latest two-way star.
But to hear most tell it, the L.A. Angels’ sometimes-starting pitcher and other times outfielder — who, with a 4-1 record on the mound and a league-leading 33 home runs at the plate, was named an All-star pitcher and outfielder and a participant in Monday’s Home
Run Derby — reminds of Babe Ruth, who pitched and played the outfield before settling in as an everyday field player for his slugging. Indeed, Sports Illustrated anointed Ohtani a once-in-acentury player.
Radcliffe did double duty as a pitcher and catcher his entire career, from about 1930-46, 11 years after Ruth retired. But Radcliffe did so in the Negro Leagues.
In the wake of yet another national racial reckoning, this time in the wake of George Floyd’s extrajudicial murder, Major League Baseball announced before this season that it would for the first time consider Negro Leagues statistics and history — Black history — as valid as its own. But that Ohtani would be compared reflexively by most of us in the media to Ruth — skipping over the career not only of Radcliffe but other Negro Leagues stars who routinely pitched and played the field, like Hall of Famer “Bullet” Joe Rogan — reminds how baked-in is the continued delegitimization of Negro Leaguers’ accomplishments. An asterisk still hovers over their achievements, while none does for white players who also played only among themselves and not against all the best players of their time. And white baseball players, unlike their Black peers, segregated themselves by choice and decree. Negro Leagues’ ballplayers continue to deserve better.
Rogan’s Hall of Fame entry notes for example, that he won 120 games and batted .338 to go with a .521 slugging percentage and a .934 OPS over his career. Fifty of his hits were home runs.
Not that Rogan, who starred for the Kansas City Monarchs, needed the validation of excelling against white baseball stars. But The Negro Leagues Museum noted when Rogan faced a Major League all-star team in an integrated California winter league, he got the win while striking out Hall of Fame outfielder Al Simmons three times and getting two hits himself. The Chicago Defender, the famed Black newspaper, wrote: “The All-stars had to look at the blinding speed of Rogan and they melted before it. Rogan was never faster in his life and the Stars merely blinked at many of his offerings as they streaked across the plate.”
“You have to understand that Negro Leagues’ rosters were not as large as Major League rosters,” Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Museum, located in Kansas City, told me by phone earlier this month. “So that versatility became vitally important just as much out of necessity as anything. Really, with the exception of Satchel, most of the pitchers in the Negro Leagues were going to play multiple positions.”
But in the run-up to Tuesday’s scheduled All-star Game, we who tell baseball’s story continue to suggest Ohtani is a unicorn.
History does not at all support that observation — unless, of course, you participate in purposefully overlooking Black history.
Maybe baseball needs a 1920 project, to study the game from the year the Negro Leagues commenced. Or, better still, an 1887 project, to examine the game from the year it adopted, in cowardly secret, one of those mischaracterized gentleman’s agreements to keep the progeny of enslaved Africans from participating with everyone else.
The truth is that Ohtani’s two-way feats are more appropriately compared to what Negro Leagues’ players did regularly than what Ruth did for the first part of his career. Ohtani reminds of Negro Leagues’ players who were not specialized, which is what Ruth became as a batter. The 27-year-old is reminiscent of Negro Leagues’ players who were encouraged to showcase the full array of their athletic abilities — and celebrated for doing so. Rogan, for example, was also credited with stealing 106 bases — including 26 in 1929, when he was 35. Ruth never stole more than 17 in a season. Ohtani, midway through his fourth season, has 41.