Off Duty

Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, probably the greatest baseball player you’ve never heard of, has died at the age of 103. With the sketchiness of Negro League records, it’s impossible to know exactly what he accomplished, but even if he achieved only a fraction of the legend, it’s a hell of a career: by some accounts, he amassed 4,000 hits, 400 home runs, 500 wins and 4,000 strikeouts. Damon Runyon bestowed Radcliffe’s nickname in a 1932 Negro League World Series doubleheader, when Radcliffe caught Satchel Paige’s shutout in the first game, then matched him by pitching his own in the nightcap. Radcliffe appeared in 6 Negro League All-Star Games, 3 each as a pitcher and a catcher, and in an exhibition game, threw out Ty Cobb attempting to steal second. On the way back to the dugout, Cobb noticed Radcliffe’s chest protector, with the inscription: “Thou shalt not steal.”

Stick a Southfork in Her

Barbara Bel Geddes, best known as the matriarch of one of TV’s most dysfunctional families, has died at the age of 82. Bel Geddes was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1948 for “I Remember Mama” and was the original Maggie the Cat in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway, but she was immortalized as Eleanor Southworth Ewing Farlow, daughter of a successful rancher who married a Texas oil wildcatter and raised a pansy, a bastard and a running back on the family ranch on Dallas. As Miss Ellie for all but two seasons – one missed following a massive heart attack, one missed as the show careened into self-parody – Bel Geddes’ brought light humor, sass and decency to balance J.R.’s evil machinations. She won the only Emmy in the show’s 13-year run and the only acting Emmy ever won by a nighttime soap actor the season that Miss Ellie had a mastectomy, drawing on her real-life experiences from a decade prior. In the early days of her career Bel Geddes also had a good relationship with Alfred Hitchcock, appearing in“Vertigo,” and several episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” most notably as the murderess who clubs her husband to death with a leg of lamb, then serves it to the police investigating his death.

Angel in the Dugout

Gene Mauch, regarded as the smartest manager to ever blow three different chances at a pennant, has finally completed something, dying at the age of 79. The cause of death was cancer, not an airway obstruction, or choking, as one might have expected. A no-nonsense field general, Mauch’s first stint came with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1960, as the third manager on another bad Phils team. The next season included a major league-record 23 consecutive losses, but by 1964, Mauch had turned them into a pennant contender. Up by 6 1/2 games with 12 to play, the Phils proceeded to lose 10 straight – including a 1-0 loss in a game when Chico F#$%#$^#$%ing Ruiz stole home in the 9th – to return the franchise to its expected finish. As a consolation prize, he was named manager of the year, his second in three years. Still, Mauch is the winningest manager in the history of this lousy franchise, and the only one to guide the team to 6 straight winning seasons. Solid but unremarkable stints followed in Montreal and Minnesota before joining the vaguely, but not yet confusingly, named California Angels. In his second season, he won the American League West pennant, led his team to a 2 games to 0 lead in the best of 5 ALCS, and was 5 innings from the World Series before losing. He came back in 1986 for another division win and was one strike from the World Series in Game 5 before the Boston Red Sox' amazing rally. Widely regarded as an excellent tactician and innovator, he was lauded as someone who could explain how an entire game played out just by looking at a box score. Finishing 11th all-time in wins, and with three NL Manager of the Year Awards, Mauch’s historic failures to win a pennant are likely the only factor keeping him out of the Hall of Fame.

Anchor’s Away

(Props to Monty)

Or

Signing off for the last time, he's Peter Jennings

(Kudos to Craig)

Or

He's News Tonight

(Honorifics to Mark)

Or

Anchored Man

(Tip o’ the cap to Mark)

Burying the Lead

(Mark completes the trifecta)

Peter Jennings, an inspiration for all Canadian high-school dropouts, threw a monkeywrench into the 2006 GHI, succumbing to lung cancer at the age of 67. Recognizing that no one would ever be able to read news behind a desk with such élan, ABC, NBC and CBS announced that, following the customary 3 days of round-the-clock coverage of his death and impact on the world, their news divisions would be shuttered immediately and they would begin airing infomercials in place of the evening news. Jennings first took the chair in 1964 at the age of 26 in a failed experiment. He was let loose on the world shortly thereafter as a foreign correspondent and helped ABC to emphasize its foreign coverage. From London, he would co-anchor the evening news with Frank Reynolds and Max Robinson in another failed experiment, before retaking the anchor spot in 1984. For a decade, Jennings kept ABC atop the news ratings, until the mid-1990s when most Americans could no longer find the rest of the world on a map if you spotted them a hemisphere. Expected to return to glory after Tom Brokaw passed the torch to hairdo Brian Williams and Dan Rather was put out to pasture like a cross-eyed steer with the mange in March 2005, Jennings made the surprising announcement in April that he had advanced lung cancer, and never appeared on camera again. He did visit the newsroom once, telling his fill-in anchor Charles Gibson how much it meant that he continued to sign off each broadcast, “For Peter Jennings and all of us here at ABC News, Good night.” Ever the newsman, he then set about critiquing the plan for that evening’s broadcast.