[To listen to the audio version, click here: Bacon – Leyland final for web with open 10-25-2013]

 

When you’re 68, working in a young man’s game, announcing your retirement does not come as a big surprise.  But before he leaves the stage, Detroit Tiger manager Jim Leyland has a few underappreciated qualities that are worth remembering.

Leyland is a baseball man to the core.  Raised in Perrysburg, Ohio, where his dad worked in a glass factory, he grew up wanting to do one thing: Play baseball.

He was good, very good, so the Tigers signed him up to play catcher in their minor league system.  But just to get to the majors, you need to be great – and after seven years battling to get to the big leagues, Leyland realized he wasn’t great.  Not as a player, at least.

So he decided to become a manager, and worked his way up from Detroit’s lowest minor league team to its highest. That climb took him from Bristol, Virginia, to Clinton, Iowa, to Montgomery, Alabama, then Lakeland, Florida, and finally Evansville, Indiana – Detroit’s top farm club.

He polished promising young prospects like Jack Morris and Dan Petry, Lance Parrish and Kirk Gibson, Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammel, into bona fide major leaguers.

They all made it to Detroit, but they left their coach behind.  When the Tigers should have hired the man who built that team, they gave the job instead to Sparky Anderson.  Okay, so Anderson had already won two World Series with the vaunted Cincinnati Reds; but even as a kid I thought they got the wrong guy.

Leyland didn’t waste any time whining about it.  He kept working away for six more years until he finally got to be a big league manager for the Pittsburgh Pirates.  They won three straight division titles before the owners conducted a “fire sale,” selling off the all-stars Leyland had helped develop.  Leyland could never understand it when somebody didn’t care as much about the game as he did.

In 1997, he took over the Florida Marlins, owned by Blockbuster Video tycoon Wayne Huizenga, and promptly led them to their first World Series title.  But the next year, Huizenga held his own fire sale, dismantling a title  team.  Leyland took a rare shot, telling the press he thought his job was to win championships, but that’s apparently not what his boss wanted.

In 2006, more than a quarter century after the Tigers’ passed him up for their top post, they named Leyland their next manager.  He took the long-dormant franchise to its first World Series in 22 years.  In eight years under Leyland, the Tigers won four division titles and two pennants.  Not bad.

But Leyland has plenty of critics.  Since the computerized approach to managing – made famous in the book and movie, “Moneyball” – took over the game about a decade ago, fans expect managers to make decisions by the book, not by their guts.  When Leyland makes all-star hitters bunt with men in scoring position, or pulls great starting pitchers for weak relievers, the fans howl, and not without reason.

But I can’t help but notice Leyland’s teams always won.  Everywhere.  In the minors.  In the majors.  In the National League.  In the American League.  At every level, in eight different states, and five different decades.

Perhaps coaching is about more than just computing.  A major league baseball team spends almost every day together for eight months a year.  They see each other more than they see their wives and kids.

Players aren’t robots.  To get almost all his players to play their best baseball of their lives when they were playing for him, Leyland must have done something computers can’t, something we don’t see during games.  By all accounts, he’s a hell of a guy, and a great leader, too.  He cares about the game – sometimes more than the millionaires who play for him — and he cares about them, too.

My dad, who served three years in the Army, told me he likes Leyland because he stands by his troops, and never chews them out in public.

Yes, that’s old school – but that was Leyland.  And it worked.

 

 

* * * * *

On Friday, October 3, I’ll be appearing on Michigan Radio 8:50-55, WTKA from 9:05-25; WBEZ-Chicago Public Radio, 9:30-45, and the Dino Costa show on Sirius XM Radio, 10-10:30.  (All times EDT.)

I’ll be on MSNBC’s “The Cycle” on Friday, November 1, around 3:40 EDT.  Also, I’ll be updating the Events link on my website soon, but until then, you can find several excerpts of Fourth and Long:

The Wall Street Journal excerpt, “How Penn State Football Survived.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323455104579014553720253962.html

My Q&A with MGoBlog about Michigan athletics.

http://mgoblog.com/content/john-bacon-qa-college-football-crossroads

My appearance on Keith Olbermann’s show on ESPN.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQOuTs9MF4A

Interview with Penn State captain Mike Mauti about “Fourth and Long.”

http://touch.mcall.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-77163212/

-Yahoosports.com

http://www.thepostgame.com/features/201308/fourth-and-long-college-football-john-u-bacon-penn-state-paterno

-elevenwarriors.com (OSU),

-MGoBlog.com (UM)

-sippinonpurple.com (Northwestern)

-Lake the Posts (Northwestern Q&A)

-The Detroit News (Our love of college football)

Here are some links to interviews, stories and reviews:

NPR Here and Now: Friday, August 30, 2013:

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/08/30/college-football-soul

Richard Retyi’s review in the Detroit News

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130829/OPINION01/308290002/1008/OPINION01/Fourth-Long-reviewed

-Will likely have several stories in regional and national publications.  More info to come.  (You can also follow me on Twitter for more details as they emerge.)