Lefty O'Doul Biography

Frank "Lefty" O'Doul

Lefty O'Doul is the only Major League player elected to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. His exclusion from the American Hall of Fame is the subject of a long-running controversy.

O'Doul played 11 years in the major leagues, setting batting records which still stand today, 75 years later. He was a manager in the Pacific Coast League for 23 years, during which time he reportedly turned down several offers to manage major league clubs. Concurrent with those two careers, O'Doul made more than 20 trips to Japan, where he distinguished himself as a player, coach, advisor and ambassador.

He was elected to the Japanese Hall of Fame for his contributions to Japanese baseball. Some say he has been denied a place at Cooperstown for the same reason, believing that embittered World War II veterans on the selection committee didn't like what he did for Japanese baseball, particularly in the years immediately after the war.

The early years of O'Doul's playing career were mediocre at best. In four seasons as a pitcher with the Yankees and Red Sox, he won only one game. Then, he went down to the Pacific Coast League, reinvented himself as a batter and came back five years later to have a spectacular run as an outfielder with the Giants, Phillies and Dodgers. In 1929, he won his first of two National League batting championships with a .398 average, set an NL record for hits in a single season with 254, hit 32 home runs and struck out only 19 times. The record for total hits has been tied but never broken. No one before or since ever hit more than 30 homers while striking out less than 20 times.

O'Doul retired after the 1934 season with a 349 lifetime average but is not listed among career leaders in the record books because he fell short of the required 1,000 games and 4,.000 at bats.

O'Doul's first trip to Japan was in 1931 with an American all-star team. He led all batters on the tour with a .600 batting average, establishing a reputation which in Japan would last his lifetime. While there, he struck up a friendship with wealthy industrialist and newspaper publisher Matsutaro Shoriki, who had underwritten the tour. Before returning home, he promised Shoriki he would try to convince Babe Ruth, his old pall from Yankee days, to visit Japan on a future post-season tour. It took a while, but Ruth finally came in 1934.

Newspapers estimated that a million people lined Tokyo's streets to greet Ruth and the Americans when they arrived. Hugh crowds turned out for every game. Although baseball had been played in Japan since 1873, its popularity soared to an all-time high with the visit of Babe Ruth. Shoriki decided the time was ripe to start professional baseball in Japan. O'Doul became one of his closest and most trusted advisors in implementing his plan.

Shoriki named his own team, the first of eight formed, Dai Nippon Tokyo Yakyu Kurabu-----The Great Japan Tokyo Baseball Club. O'Doul convinced him that something simpler would be better, like Tokyo Giants. Shoriki agreed, but later changed it to Yomiuri Giants, to publicize his newspaper, the Yomiuri Shinbun.

In 1935, Shoriki had a team but no one to play against. With O'Doul's assistance, he sent the team to the United States on a 110-game barnstorming tour. By the next year, Japan had seven professional teams and was ready to begin league play. To prepare his team, Shoriki sent the Giants to California to take spring training with the San Francisco Seals, managed by O'Doul, who by then had concluded his major league career and returned to his hometown as player-manager.

O'Doul had been impressed with the fielding and base running abilities of the Japanese players since first seeing them in 1931, but he thought their potential as hitters was still to be realized. In 1932, he made the first of numerous visits as a coach and batting instructor, tutoring players at six different Tokyo universities. His post-season visits continued through 1936, but he and most other foreigners were unwelcome from 1937 until after World War II.

O'Doul didn't wait to be invited back after the war. With the encouragement and approval of General Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. occupation forces in Japan, he traveled to Japan in 1946 to begin the groundwork for the resumption of relations between Japanese and American ballplayers. "I knew if we took a baseball team over there it would cement friendship between their people and ours, "O'Doul said. It's doubtful he anticipated an American baseball team would have such a profound effect on the Japanese as it had.

He brought his first post-war team to Japan in 1949. The repercussions transcended everything O'Doul ever did on a baseball field. They transcended baseball itself.

Baseball was so popular in Japan that play had almost survived the war uninterrupted, continuing until October 1944, less than a year before atomic bombs dropped by American B-29s ended the war. When O'Doul and his San Francisco Seals arrived in 1949, he found the Japanese starving for baseball. He also found the country in a deep, dark depression.

Within six weeks, O'Doul and his team of minor leaguers managed to restore the nation's morale, break the post-war tension in Japanese-American relations and lay a new foundation for friendship between the two countries. MacArthur said later: "This is the greatest piece of diplomacy ever."

Toru Shoriki, later the owner and president of the Yomiuri Giants, said: "The tour was the most successful goodwill event ever made on an international scale at that time." Emperor Hirohito was so grateful that he summoned O'Doul to the Imperial Palace to thank him personally.

O'Doul's visits to Japan and his influence on baseball there continued throughout his life. To this day, the Yomiuri Giants wear uniforms almost identical to those of the 1934 New York Giants, O'Doul's last big league club. In 1953, the Yomiuri Giants and New York Giants shared a spring training camp in California. In 1954, after years of urging from O'Doul, the Japanese established a minor league of farm teams.

Delivering the eulogy at O'Doul's funeral in 1969, Monsignor Vincent Breen spoke for Japanese and Americans alike when he said: "No single man did more to reestablish faith and friendship between our great nations than did Lefty O'Doul."

Contributed by Richard Leutzinger