Lefty Left Out Again

LEFTY LEFT OUT AGAIN
By Dick Meister

The Veterans Committee did it again in voting on February 27 for new members
of baseball's Hall of Fame. Once again, the committee bypassed Lefty O'Doul.

Yes, I know lots of other former players belong in the Hall but aren't
there, and that you could name a few yourself. But I also know you'd be
hard-pressed to find any among the missing with more impressive credentials
than Francis Joseph O'Doul.

It would be at least as difficult to find a ballplayer who had a more
colorful career than the flamboyant, fiercely competitive, tall, trim,
darkly handsome man of Irish and French ancestry once widely known as "Mr.
San Francisco" --and known, too, as "The Man in the Green Suit" because of
the distinctive clothes he wore in his frequent rounds of the night spots in
his native city, including his own popular bar and restaurant.

"He was here at a good time and had a good time while he was here," as it
says on O'Doul's tombstone, just above an embedded bat and ball.

As he often said, O'Doul had his most fun compiling a lifetime batting
average of .349. That's the seventh highest in the entire history of Major
League Baseball. The only players who did better were superstars Ty Cobb,
No. 1 at .367, Rogers Hornsby (.358) and Joe Jackson (.356), plus three guys
you probably never heard of who played before 1900.

And that's just part of it. Among other notable feats, O'Doul hit .398 in
winning the first of his two National League batting titles. That was in
1929. O'Doul, then with the Philadelphia Phillies, got 254 hits that year,
an extraordinary total later equaled by the New York Giants' Bill Terry, but
still the National League record for a single season. It's just three short
of the major league record for a single season, held by American League
superstar George Sisler.

O'Doul, furthermore, beat the old record -- it was 250, held by Hornsby--
by going four- for-four against lefthanded Hall of Famer Carl Hubbell in the
first game of a season-ending doubleheader against the Giants. Then he went
three-for-four against another lefthander, Bill Walker.

Inspired no doubt by the handsome $500 raise (to $8,500) that his efforts
won him, O'Doul did almost as well the next season. Although he lost the
batting title to Terry, who hit .401, O'Doul hit .383 for the incredible
Phillies of 1930. The team had six starters who hit .324 or better,
including outfielder Chuck Klein, the leader at .386 with 40 home runs and
170 runs batted in, plus a utility man at .341 and a reserve catcher at
.313.

That's right: The Phillies had eight ,300 hitters among the team's regulars
(and a starting second baseman and shortstop who both hit better than .285).
Yet the team finished dead last, a very distant 40 games behind the pennant
-winning St. Louis Cardinals.

Thanks to O'Doul and his fellow sluggers, the 1930 Phils scored an
astonishing average of 6.8 runs per game. But thanks to what surely were
just about the most inept pitchers and fielders in major league annals, they
gave up an astonishing 7.7 runs per game.

O'Doul later was traded to Brooklyn, winning his second batting title there
in 1932 with an average of .368. That time, though, there was no raise. By
then, the Great Depression was in full swing. Despite his batting title,
O'Doul's pay was cut by $1,000 the next season. Imagine a batting champion
of today playing a full season for $7,500!

Years afterward, O'Doul told Lawrence S. Ritter, author of "The Glory of
their Times":

"If I had to do it all over, I'd be a ballplayer again without pay. Yeah,
without pay. I loved it. That's why I never squawked when I didn't get big
salaries. I liked to play too much....When I was playing ball in the big
leagues my bats would be jumping up and down in the trunk. Couldn't wait to
get to the ball park and grab that bat. Big crowd, sock a triple, nothing
like it! Maybe I was a ham. What's the use of doing something when nobody's
looking? But a packed ball park, crowd roaring, the guy throws you a great
breaking curve, you hit it on the nose and drive it over the outfielder's
head. What a thrill!"

On another occasion, O'Doul insisted, "There's nothing hard about hitting
.300. That's only three every ten tries -- piece-a-cake. If somebody could
run for me, I could go up to the plate in a wheelchair and and hit .300."
He may not have been exaggerating. While managing in the Pacific Coast
League in 1956 at the age of 59, O'Doul once put himself in to pinch- hit --
and got a triple.

Actually, O'Doul worked very hard on his hitting. He frequently studied
films of himself batting and regularly showed up at the ball park hours
before game time for long sessions of extra practice. He'd have teammates
and local kids pitching to him and shagging balls virtually every morning.

O'Doul had good reason to work so hard. He was a converted pitcher who might
very well have been as good at pitching as he became at hitting had it not
been for a bit of foolishness at the New York Yankees' spring training camp
in 1922.

O'Doul, who had come up to the Yankees after winning 25 games for the
Pacific Coast League's San Francisco Seals, got into a distance-throwing
contest with his teammates that left him with a permanently weakened arm.
O'Doul remained in the major leagues for two seasons as a pitcher, with the
Yankees and then the Red Sox, but managed a paltry overall record of just
1-1.

O'Doul finally was sent back to the Coast League in 1924, switching to the
outfield and hitting in the high .300s in each of the next four seasons
before being called back to the majors in 1928. O'Doul left the big leagues
for good in 1935 to take over as the Seals' 37-year-old player-manager.

O'Doul was a great favorite with San Franciscans. They had sent him off to
the big leagues seven years before with a spirited day of his own at the
Seals' ball park.

O'Doul, donning a cowboy hat, red kerchief and chaps, jumped on a horse to
lead a mounted crew of "Butchertown cowboys" around and around the field,
the "cowboys" being men who handled cows at the slaughterhouse in the
Butchertown district of the city where O'Doul was born and raised. After the
game, O'Doul climbed to the grandstand roof and tossed free baseballs to the
huge crowd of kids -- and adults -- who scrambled for them on the field
below.

O'Doul the manager became a fixture at Seals Stadium. For 17 years he was
there, striding anxiously between the white lines of the third base coaching
box, peering intently from the top of the dugout steps, directing fans as
well as players against such opponents as the Oakland Oaks of manager Casey
Stengel and the Seattle Rainiers, managed by Rogers Hornsby.

It was during one of the Seals' always hotly contested battles with the Oaks
from across San Francisco Bay in 1948 that pine tar was first brought to the
attention of serious baseball fans.

Like every other manager in the league, O'Doul was certain that Stengel's
star relief pitcher, Ralph Buxton -- nicknamed "The Cheater" -- was
doctoring the ball with pine tar, but unsure of where he was hiding the
stuff.

Finally, O'Doul hit on it, during a particularly heated game between the
Seals and Oaks. "Look at his glove! The glove!" O'Doul shouted to the plate
umpire. And sure enough, there was the goop smeared all across the heel.
O'Doul demanded that Buxton be tossed from the game, but the umpire tossed
out only the gooey glove.

O'Doul took his protest all the way to the league president, demanding a
forfeit of the game the Seals ended up losing 4-3 and touching off heated
controversy on West Coast sports pages. But all the league did was suspend
Buxton for ten days. Of course he used pine tar, Buxton admitted -- "but
three of Lefty's pitchers use it, too."

Stengel brought Buxton with him when he took over the next season as manager
of the Yankees. Years later, Buxton disclosed that by the end of that 1949
season, "the whole Yankee staff was using my pine tar" -- and helping win
the first of Stengel's 10 Yankee pennants.

O'Doul usually spoke in quite coherent sentences, but otherwise was every
bit as colorful a manager as the famously loquacious Casey Stengel. I
remember that clearly from my own youthful days as a fanatic Seals' fan.
Often when the Seals fell behind, Lefty would pull a big red bandana from a
hip pocket and wave it wildly at the opposing pitcher, a signal for all of
us in the stands to pull out our pocket handkerchiefs and wave them.

When the enemy pitcher faltered, we knew we had helped. We were all on
Lefty's team, our team. Lefty wasn't perfect, though. When the Seals lost,
and they lost at least as often as they won, he became "Marblehead O'Doul,"
the manager who had let us down again -- but one of us all the same, a
member of the family only temporarily gone wrong.

The spirit of the man! It shone from piercing yet twinkling dark eyes that
looked right out at you. You could feel it in the air at Seals Stadium.
O'Doul was "an inspiration to kids and catnip to the ladies," noted
newspaper columnist Herb Caen - "always in trouble with women, always broke,
always laughing like a little boy."

O'Doul was asked repeatedly to manage major league teams, but turned down
the offers because, he explained, "San Francisco is my home." A new team
owner from outside the city fired him as the Seals' manager in 1951. But by
then, O'Doul - "brokenhearted," he said - was considered a has-been by the
major league teams that had coveted him, and he was forced to manage
elsewhere in the Pacific Coast League.

For a half-dozen years O'Doul drifted like a man without a country from one
Coast League city to another, managing teams in San Diego, Oakland,
Vancouver and Seattle until finally retiring in 1957, the very first year
major league baseball came to the Pacific Coast.

The major league teams that had sought O'Doul were particularly impressed by
his great skill as a hitting instructor, maybe the best in all of baseball.

Among those helped by O'Doul was Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio, who played for
him as a 20-year-old right fielder in 1935. DiMaggio led the Seals to the
pennant that year, hitting .398, along with 34 homers and 154 RBIs, before
moving to the Yankees.

"I was an all-fields hitter," DiMaggio recalled, "but when the Yankees got
interested in me, Lefty decided we'd better try pull hitting."

That was exactly what DiMaggio needed to succeed in Yankee Stadium, where it
was a relatively cozy 340 feet down the left field line but a long, long 461
feet to center.

"Lefty," DiMaggio noted in a nice bit of understatement, "had an eye for the
right way to hit."

The best advice O'Doul ever gave a hitter, Lefty and Ted Williams used to
say, was the advice O'Doul passed on to Hall of Famer Williams when he was a
19-year-old outfielder for the San Diego Padres, then in the Pacific Coast
League.

"A lot of people tried to change my style," Williams recalled, "but Lefty
gave me perfect non-advice: 'Kid, don't let anyone change that swing.'"

Nobody did change Williams' swing and he eventually became the only other
player in the past three-quarters of a century besides Hall of Famer Bill
Terry to hit for a higher seasonal average than O'Doul. Williams did it in
1941, when he hit .406.

If for nothing else, O'Doul belongs in the Hall of Fame for his
indispensable role in developing baseball in Japan -- a role that earned him
admission to Japan's Hall of Fame in 2002 for being "the Father of
Professional Baseball" in that country.

O'Doul was immensely popular in Japan. He played on U.S. all-star teams that
began touring the country in the early 1930s, later managing those and other
teams that drew huge capacity crowds. He coached hundreds of young Japanese
players and was the chief adviser to those who in 1934 formed Japan's first
professional team at his urging -- the Tokyo Giants, named after the team
for which O'Doul was then playing. Later, he helped organize an entire
professional league.

O'Doul's annual tours of Japan ended abruptly with the outbreak of World War
II. But he returned after the war as in effect a good will ambassador, most
notably in 1949 for a series of exhibition games by the San Francisco Seals.

As before, hundreds of thousands of fans crowded the Japanese stadiums. As
before, there were loud and repeated cries of "Banzai, O'Doul! Banzai!"

General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the U.S. occupation forces, called
O'Doul's tour "the greatest piece of diplomacy ever." MacArthur and others
said it was a major factor in overcoming the great postwar enmity between
the United States and Japan.

Lefty O'Doul died at 72 in 1969, still denied, then as now, the ultimate
honor that baseball can bestow, one few others have more richly deserved.

Copyright © Dick Meister

Story ID:	1764
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Local Legend
Location:	San Francisco CA USA
Year:	2007
Person:	Lefty O'Doul