This piece is part of an On Leadership roundtable on the best managers in baseball today.
Without a doubt the best manager in baseball these days is Jim Leyland, manager of the Detroit Tigers.
But I am biased.
The Tigers are my favorite team and Jim hails from my hometown of Perrysburg, Ohio. Leyland was an all-around athlete at Perrysburg High School. He comes from a big Irish Catholic family; his older brother is a priest, his sister who worked for my father was a nurse, and his youngest brother was a boyhood friend of mine.
I can still recall the news of Jim’s signing with the Tigers. We had all thought Jim would be catching for the Tigers one day. But of course it took him 43 years to reach the Tigers—and not as a catcher but as a manager. And it is over those 40-plus years that you come to an understanding of why Leyland is such an extraordinary talent.
Before coming to the Tigers he was manager of the year at every level in the minors, and he managed the Pirates to division titles and the Marlins to a World Series title. And in his first year as manager of the Tigers in 2006, he guided them to the World Series.
Note the term manager. In baseball, we don’t have coaches as we do in other sports. Nope. We have managers. Likely it has to do with the process behind the game: the art and science of putting players into positions where they can succeed in the field and at the plate. We call that management.
And that's where few are better than Jim Leyland. All you have to know about him is that he is first and foremost a people person. You wouldn’t know it from the way he bites off comments to the beat writers, or the way he sometimes yells at umpires. But scratch the surface, and Jim’s a people guy.
That he learned from his father, for whom he is named. James Leyland, Sr., was a foreman for Libby Owens Ford, then the largest glassmaker in the world. He was the kind of supervisor men wanted to work for – approachable and accessible, but no-nonsense when it came to getting the work done. That’s Jim to a tee.
Like his dad, Jim knows his business. He has a baseball mind. He plays the diamond like a chess master. His prowess was on full display late in the season and most definitely in the first round of the playoffs against the Yankees. With his masterful substitutions for pitchers and insertion of defensive players, he put the Tigers in a position to win.
Strategically and tactically Jim’s a whiz, but that’s not his true gift. His forte is what he gets out of his players. According to a recent poll of major league players, Jim was voted among the managers players most want to play for. Case in point: Bobby Bonds, the home-run slugger with a perpetual foul demeanor whom Jim managed at Pittsburgh in the early ‘80s, liked to play for him. The respect these two have for one another remains to this day.
The reason may be that Jim appreciates their talents. Having been a minor league player, he knows what it's like to play the game but also respects what it takes to play the game at the highest level possible. That’s something he was never able to do; his playing career stopped at Single A.
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