Friday, December 14, 2007

A Great Team


One-third of the '31 Homestead Grays baseball team is now enshrined in Baseball's Hall of Fame. They are: "Smokey" Joe Williams (tallest man in back row), Josh Gibson (to Joe's left), George Scales, Oscar Charleston, Jud Wilson and Cumberland Posey (team owner). They had other great ballplayers too, like "Terrible" Ted Page (watch out for those spikes!) and Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe.

With 136 wins and 19 losses that year, catcher "Double Duty" said it best: "Unbelieveable, unbelieveable. We had Owens, Charleston, Williams, George Britt, Bill Foster, Smokey Joe Williams and myself. Now how ya goin' to beat us? We went to Kansas City and beat them seven straight. We beat everybody. We had a team."

Double Duty was the last surviving member of this great team when we met him in 2001. I'll tell you more about that later on.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I hope you will also share stories of Double Duty's flirtatiousness! He was a riot.

Sarah said...

Double Duty sounds like fun! I love the old nicknames. I'd probably just be Lefty.