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…
