“I’d say it’s big,” Detroit Tigers General Manager Dave Dombrowski said yesterday when asked if the series with the Chicago White Sox was his team’s biggest of the season. “I’m sure it will be bigger as the year goes on.”
The surprising Tigers are in first place in the American League Central with the best record in the major leagues (62-30), and they are four and a half games ahead of the Chicago White Sox, the defending World Series champions. In the nearly six weeks since they last met, the Tigers have won 24 of 32 games, the White Sox 21 of 32.
Because they won it all last season, the White Sox did not have to convince anyone of their bona fides. Only three years ago, however, the Tigers lost 119 games, nearly a major league record, and they entered this year with 12 successive losing seasons. They had to play deeper into this season to convince people that they were for real.
“I think the question of being for real has disappeared,” Dombrowski said. “We legitimately have a very solid club. Where that takes us remains to be seen. We have a long haul ahead of us.”
Manager Jim Leyland said: “We’re not the 1961 Yankees; I can assure you of that. But I think we’re the real deal. We’re a pretty good team.”
•Dombrowski, in his fifth year of running the Tigers, has done a marvelous job improving the team. He built the 1997 World Series champion Florida Marlins, and he has the Tigers headed in that direction with 19 more victories than they had for the entire 2003 season, Dombrowski’s second as the general manager.
The Tigers won 72 games for a major improvement in 2004, but they didn’t improve last year, so Dombrowski decided he needed to change managers. By hiring Leyland to replace Alan Trammell, Dombrowski got the manager the Philadelphia Phillies could have had a year earlier.
Teams often make mistakes when hiring managers and general managers. The Milwaukee Brewers, for example, passed up Omar Minaya and Willie Randolph several years ago, and now that pair has directed the Mets to the best record in the National League.
Minaya, the Brewers said, lacked administrative skills, and Randolph lacked experience. Teams sometimes whisper such euphemisms when they are not prepared to hire Hispanics and blacks. Minaya, whom the Mets also initially passed up, has proved to be an outstanding general manager. Randolph has demonstrated that white guys aren’t the only ones who can manage in the majors without minor league managing experience.
Leyland wasn’t one of those white guys. He put in more than his share of time in the minors, managing in the Tigers’ system for 11 years. That run ended in 1982, when he landed a coaching job with the White Sox, where Dombrowski was the assistant general manager. Dombrowski hired Leyland as his manager in Florida in 1997. In pursuing him this time, Dombrowski had an advantage over the Phillies, who bypassed Leyland for Charlie Manuel for the 2005 season.
Leyland had walked away from managing after the 1999 season with the Colorado Rockies. He went home to Pittsburgh to his wife and two children, and worked as a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals for the next five years. He had worked under their manager, Tony La Russa, when he was with the White Sox.
“My kids and wife wanted me to continue to manage, but I didn’t want to,” the 61-year-old Leyland said. “I was burned out. There were a couple times the last few years that I’d been contacted to see if I was interested. I said no. I wasn’t ready for it.”
But the Cardinals had a positive impact on Leyland. “I was so impressed with that clubhouse,” he said. “I started thinking about it and felt I wanted to give it another chance.”
He interviewed with the Phillies, and they should have hired him. But Leyland had left three managing jobs — the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Florida Marlins and the Rockies — and the Phillies didn’t know him well enough to sense that he was ready for the job. That didn’t happen with the Tigers.
“We know each other well,” Dombrowski said. “When he has that passion and fire, he’s one of the best managers in baseball. It was apparent he had that back.”
How could Dombrowski tell? “Sitting down with him for a couple minutes and talking to him,” he said.
Leyland, it has turned out, was the perfect choice for the Tigers. Could anyone else have sparked them the way he has?
“I don’t think so,” Dombrowski said. “To me, the way he has handled this club, he has done a masterful job. He’s one of the main reasons we are where we are. He’s done a fantastic job handling situations and players. He’s what our ball club needed.”
•Pshaw, Leyland might say if he were in the comics.
“I haven’t done anything,” he said. “It’s a matter of people maturing and growing up. They were probably rushing some players. They’ve caught up now. That and starting to believe in yourself. We were adamant that we were going to play the game right. They kind of bought into it.”
They especially bought into Leyland’s system when he read them the riot act after a particularly poor game in mid-April. After starting 7-7, the Tigers won 28 of their next 35 games, leapfrogging the White Sox and taking command of first place May 21.
“We started out bad this year,” Leyland said. “They were pointing fingers. We eliminated that. They didn’t want to be embarrassed.”
Just as he played down his contribution to the Tigers’ standing, Leyland shrugged off the importance of the series against the White Sox.
“Everybody is making a big deal of the series,” he said, “but if we sweep them or they sweep us, it’s July 18. I just want to play well.”
