A few facts about Lefty O'Doul and Chuck Klein:
1) O’Doul’s road to baseball began at age 15 in 1912 at the Bay View School in San Francisco. The school’s baseball coach, a woman named Rosie Stoltz, helped develop his fundamentals. He later noted, Stoltz “taught me the essential fundamentals of the game. She taught me to pitch, field and hit.” Their club won the city championship that first year. The following year, at age sixteen, O’Doul quit school to join his father in the slaughterhouse.
2) Playing for the San Francisco Seals in 1927, O’Doul
won the first-ever PCL most valuable player award, batting .378 with 278 hits and 33 home runs. But he actually made his MLB debut in 1919 and had already made a few appearances between in 1919-20, 22-23 mostly as a below average pitcher. (His official Rookie season was 1923 at age 26)
3)
Had his breakout year at age 32 in 1929, collecting 254 hits, batting .398, hitting 32 Home Runs and narrowly finishing 2nd in the MVP voting behind Rogers Hornsby. Finished his career with a .349 Batting Average—4th Best all-time.
4) After leaving the majors, O’Doul returned to his birthplace of San Francisco and managed the San Francisco Seals (PCL) for 17 years (a team he had briefly pitched for in 1916), as well as other teams, amassing more than 2,000 wins, a total surpassed by only eight men in minor league history. The most famous player he managed was Joe DiMaggio, another San Franciscan. About Joe he said “I was just smart enough to leave him alone.”
5)
A renowned batting coach, his pupils include Ted Williams, Willie Mays, and Willie McCovey in addition to the DiMaggio brothers.
6) He trained countless Japanese in the skills of the game and fostered communication and interaction between those in the Japanese and American games both before and after the Second World War.
He is also credited as one of the founders of Nippon Professional Baseball. For his efforts, O’Doul was the first American elected to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame.
7)
The Tokyo Giants, sometimes considered "Japan's Baseball Team", were named by him in 1935 in honor of his longtime association with the New York Giants; the logo and uniform of the Giants in Japan strongly resemble their North American counterparts.
8) At age 60, he opened the sports bar/restaurant Lefty O’Doul’s in 1957, which was one of the longest running sports bars in the country, closing its doors in
2017 after almost 60 years.