Lefty O’Doul: Baseball’s Forgotten Ambassador by Dennis Snelling (review)

I’m an unabashed Lefty O’Doul fan and in fact cannot visit San Francisco without a stop at the restaurant bearing Lefty’s name (and many wonderful photos of him) just off Union Square. So I happily devoured Dennis Snelling’s full length biography of O’Doul, all to my betterment. First, the book is aptly titled for O’Doul’s role in popularizing baseball in Japan, both before and after World War II, is today largely forgotten. This biography, thoroughly researched, well written and full of fascinating anecdotes, will help to rectify that.

O’Doul is in a real sense one of the founders of Japanese professional baseball, as the author recounts in some detail. O’Doul first organized a barnstorming tour to Japan after the 1934 World Series which included the likes of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Charlie Gehringer, and Moe Berg among others. After the tour O’Doul remained in Japan for several weeks to help organize professional baseball there. He suggested that the Tokyo team be called the Giants, after the New York Giants team he played for in the United States (135). The club even adopted the New York Giants orange and black color scheme. Of course, O’Doul’s imprint in Japan remains as today the Tokyo Giants continue to be the most popular and successful team in Japanese professional baseball history, replete with their orange and black trimmed uniforms.

The author points out that in 2002, Japanese baseball rectified a significant oversight by electing O’Doul to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame (280). That long overdue honor brings up an interesting corollary point; O’Doul’s non-election to our Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. After all, O’Doul was an exceptional ballplayer and has an astonishing lifetime batting average of .349 in 11 major league seasons (his minor league batting average over parts of 16 seasons was .352). The rub, however, is longevity because O’Doul was a major league regular for only six of those 11 seasons.

Still, as the author duly notes, those six seasons were remarkable. After hitting .319 for the New York Giants in 1928, he had two gargantuan years with the Philadelphia Phillies, batting a league-leading .398 (one hit from a .400 season) in 1929 and then .383 in 1930. In 1929 he pounded out a major league record 254 hits. After “slumping” to .336 in 1931 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, he again led the league in hitting in 1932 with a .368 average. He then hit .286 in 1933 before finishing his big-league career as a part-time player while batting .316 in 1934.

The author suggests that O’Doul’s own stubbornness may have cost him a spot in the Hall of Fame. He broke into the major leagues with the New York Yankees in 1919 as a 22-year-old pitcher with indifferent success. In fact, in parts of four big league seasons on the mound he won only one game. But, although his batting skills began to emerge during that time, O’Doul stubbornly refused to give up pitching and become a full-time outfielder (40). He finally did become a position player in 1924 and put together four exceptional years in the Pacific Coast League with the Salt Lake City Bees, Hollywood Stars, and the San Francisco Seals. However, by the time the New York Giants purchased O’Doul’s contract in 1928 and he became a big league regular, he was 31 years old. Thus, when O’Doul left the big leagues after the 1934 season to begin a long and distinguished career as a manager in the Pacific Coast League, he was turning 38.

One might ask why it took O’Doul so long to return to the big leagues after switching to the outfield, since he hit .392, 375, .338, and .378 in those four PCL seasons. In part, according to the author...