Member-only story
Lefty O’Doul: Batting Champion, Baseball Missionary, & San Francisco’s “Man in the Green Suit”
I f not for the baseball missionary work of Lefty O’Doul there might have never been an Ichiro Suzuki.
O’Doul was baseball’s polymath: star pitcher, batting champion, father of professional baseball in Japan, successful manager, innovative batting coach, conduit to major league’s expansion to the west coast. He even created a popular Bloody Mary recipe. If there was ever a reason for inducting a person into the Baseball Hall of Fame for his lifetime contribution to the sport, the life of Francis Joseph O’Doul is it.
They called him “The Man in the Green Suit” because that was his favorite uniform off the field, and O’Doul loved to be seen wearing his dapper outfit, usually with a fresh carnation in his lapel. As much as anyone has ever personified a city, O’Doul owned San Francisco for decades. He rubbed shoulders with mayors, business owners, as well as the common people who sold fruit on the streets or mowed the grass at the ballpark. Years before there was Major League Baseball in the Bay Area, O’Doul was already “big league.”
He was born in San Francisco in 1897, about the time electric cable cars first started to criss-cross the city. It was 50 years after the Gold Rush, but when little Francis was growing up in the meat-packing neighborhoods the city was undergoing a transformation that led to people calling San Francisco the “Paris of the West.”
O’Doul was originally a pitcher, a hard-throwing southpaw. He became “Lefty” when he pitched for the San Francisco Seals in 1917. Initially, O’Doul didn’t have a great idea where his fastball was going, he struggled to throw strikes. But he became proficient and was signed by the Yankees, where he pitched without distinction for a few years before he was shuffled to the Red Sox. But somewhere in there, Lefty suffered the final and most serious arm injury of his career, and he was forced to concentrate on playing the outfield and hitting.
Fortunately for O’Doul and the teams he later played for after ending his pitching career, Lefty could hit a baseball. His transition to the outfield was smooth: in 1925 back in the Pacific Coast League with Salt Lake City, O’Doul hit .375 with 309 hits in 198 games. Two years later…
