Before Integration, There Were the Negro Leagues. The Double Duty Classic Makes Sure No One Forgets.

Photos “Courtesy of the Chicago White Sox” and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum”.
Photos “Courtesy of the Chicago White Sox” and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum”.

                       1992 Bo Jackson and Leon Day


Before Integration, There Were the Negro Leagues. The Double Duty Classic Makes Sure No One Forgets.


Now in its 19th year, the White Sox annual high school baseball showcase has become something bigger than a game. It's a living bridge between Chicago's Black baseball past and the players who will carry it forward.


When Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe was pitching and catching for the Chicago American Giants in the 1930s, he could not have known that nearly seven decades later, a high school baseball showcase would carry his nickname into a new century. But that is exactly what the White Sox Double Duty Classic has done since 2007 -- kept the names, the stories, and the spirit of Negro Leagues baseball alive on the South Side, one class of young players at a time.

On July 22, 2026, Rate Field will host the 19th annual Double Duty Classic, an event that has grown from a regional game into one of the most culturally significant youth baseball showcases in the country. High school players from across the country will work out at De La Salle High School on Tuesday before gathering at the ballpark Wednesday evening for a game that is part competition, part history lesson, and part community celebration. Admission is free.

But for the coaches and former players who have lived it across nearly two decades, the Double Duty Classic is harder to define in a single sentence.

A NAME THAT CARRIES WEIGHT

Radcliffe earned his nickname from the sportswriter Damon Runyon, who once said it was "worth the price of double admission" to see him pitch game one of a doubleheader and catch the second. As a player who lined up at both positions in a single day at the 1932 East-West All-Star Game, Radcliffe embodied the kind of do-everything versatility the Negro Leagues demanded of its players -- men who were often better than their major league counterparts but never given the chance to prove it on the same field.

The White Sox launched the Double Duty Classic in 2007 as a way to honor that history while giving the next generation of Black players something the Negro Leagues' pioneers never had: visibility, access, and a pathway to the next level. Each year, players take the field in retro uniforms honoring the historic Negro Leagues East-West All-Star teams -- the East in cream, the West in navy -- and time is spent educating the younger generation on the league's rich and complicated history. The MVP of each game receives the Minnie Miñoso Award, named after the Black Latino trailblazer and Hall of Famer who played in both the Negro Leagues and MLB.

In 19 years, 44 DDC players have been selected in the MLB draft, including Ed Howard, a Chicago kid taken by the Cubs in the first round in 2020, and Corey Ray, a first-round pick by the Milwaukee Brewers in 2016, now a first base coach for the Washington Nationals. The event has become a fixture of Chicago's summer sports calendar -- and a rare space where Black baseball history is not simply acknowledged but actively passed down.

This year, that history will have a face.

Dennis Biddle, a former pitcher for the Chicago American Giants, will be in attendance on July 22. Biddle joined the American Giants in 1953 at just 17 years old, and his connection to Ted Radcliffe is direct and personal -- Radcliffe caught Biddle's first professional game. For many of the high school players taking the field that night, Biddle will be the first former Negro Leaguer they have ever met in person. For Biddle, watching them play carries a weight that is difficult to put into words.


Biddle's presence at the Double Duty Classic comes at a moment when the national conversation about Black American history is louder than it has been in years. With America's 250th anniversary approaching, programs like this one are carrying that conversation into spaces -- baseball diamonds, high school dugouts, family dinners at the ballpark -- where it can reach people who might never pick up a history book.

"Jackie Robinson did not open the door. He cracked the door," Biddle has said of that era. "It was nine years before every major-league team had a Black ballplayer. And a lot of old players fell through the cracks." The Double Duty Classic exists, in part, to make sure that story is never lost.


FROM THE FIELD TO THE DUGOUT

Troy Williams III did not need a history book to understand what the Double Duty Classic meant. He lived it.

Williams competed in the tournament in 2008 as a student at Simeon Career Academy. Today, he is one of the longest-tenured coaches in the White Sox ACE (Amateur City Elite) program -- the same program that runs the Double Duty Classic -- and he will be back at Rate Field on July 22 watching a new group of young men go through the same experience that helped set the direction of his own life.


In the early 2000s, Williams has noted, scouts rarely visited Chicago -- let alone the South Side. The ACE program built the Double Duty Classic specifically to change that. "What better place to do it than here," Williams has said of Rate Field. He has now coached young players who were born after he first stood on that field as a participant. That arc -- from player to coach, across nearly two decades of the same program -- is itself a testament to what the DDC has built.


The 19th Annual Double Duty Classic is open to the public and carries the full weight of what the event has become.

Pregame activities begin at 4 p.m. and include "Lift Every Voice and Sing" performed by a Chicago HBCU alumni group around 5:45 p.m -- a deliberate choice that places the evening in the tradition of the Black national anthem sung at Negro Leagues games for generations. The national anthem will be performed by a participating player's mother. The Jessie White Tumblers, one of Chicago's most beloved community institutions, will perform outside Gate 4 around 4:30 p.m. First pitch is at 6 p.m.

The night before, on Monday July 21, the players and their families gather at the ballpark for a dinner and panel discussion featuring Tyrone Brooks from MLB, college coaches and NILcompliance officers, and other leaders from baseball and education. It is a room designed to give young athletes the information they need to make real decisions about their futures -- and to understand the full picture of what a baseball career, and an education, can look like.

When the White Sox launched the Double Duty Classic in 2007, they were making a bet that a high school baseball showcase grounded in Negro Leagues history could matter to the South Side community. Nineteen years later, that bet has paid off in ways harder to quantify than wins and losses.

Forty-four players have gone on to be selected in the MLB draft. Coaches who came up through the ACE program have stayed connected to it for years, then decades. And former Negro Leaguers like Dennis Biddle -- men who joined teams like the Chicago American Giants as teenagers with big-league dreams they were rarely allowed to chase -- have stood on that field and watched young men play a game their generation was once told was not for them.




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