Leyland says he'll stick it out - they'll have to fire me

Saturday, August 16, 2008
Jerry Green
Green: Leyland says he'll stick it out this time

As the ballclub floundered the group of owners gathered in a solemn caucus and reached the inevitable decision. It was unanimous. Fire the manager. They marched en masse to the clubhouse and informed the manager, a passionate, emotional man, that he was done. Gone! Fired!

Given what we sports addicts in Detroit came to know by the piquant local expression: "Given the ziggy."

This is a true description of an actual event. The first time I ever saw a manager fired, given the ziggy, the blade, the ax, the guillotine.

There are many words to describe the situation. It is never pretty.

The manager on this occasion was a decent man named Bill Norman, who reached his life's ambition when hired to manage the Tigers in 1958. He dropped the usual clichés: "Some days you win, some days you lose, and some days it rains." Beer was available in big-league clubhouses back then. And Norman loved his Budweiser.

And that day, with the Tigers 2-15 at the start of the 1959 season, Norman's emotions flowed. He had just gotten the ziggy and when we ink-stained wretches were permitted into the clubhouse, Norman merely stared ahead.

His eyes were red-rimmed. He clutched his white, plastic cup of Budweiser. And he said nothing.

No job security

Firing the manager is an entrenched part of baseball. It happens every year to some of these gray men who watch their expectations for their ballclubs wither.

They are vagabonds -- most of them who toil as managers in the big leagues. They drift from club to club, fired say in New York, remerging in Los Angeles. And the ancient cliché is: "Managers are hired to be fired."

The redoubtable George Anderson, aka Sparky, caught the ziggy twice en route to the Hall of Fame as a manager. Cincinnati and here in Detroit, with a gentle nudge, forced out.

A gentle nudge! Forced out! No matter the euphemism, it totals up to the dreaded ziggy.

The cream of the major-league managers throughout history have gotten it. Joe Torre three times. Tony LaRussa twice. Leo Durocher. Casey Stengel. Joe McCarthy, Jimmie Dykes. Billy Martin seven times, with the Twins, here with the Tigers, the Rangers, the Athletics and five times with the Yankees.

So it is quite amazing that Jim Leyland has been immune to catching the dreaded ziggy. Leyland, alone, to my knowledge is the only successful manager who went from club to club, chartered in the vagabond group, who never has been fired.

Leyland, rather, became the master of the self-ziggy.

He departed from the Pirates, the Marlins and the Rockies by his own choice. He suffered for one reason of another, decided the hell with it -- and left. He left Pittsburgh after considerable success, establishing himself as a premier manager, when the club went to rot and did not sign free agents as promised. He escaped from the Marlins after winning a World Series when the owner conducted a fire sale of the champions' better players and left Leyland with the ashes. He took off from Colorado when he decided it was not a major-league situation.

Doing it his way

Every time he did it his away -- three ballclubs, three times escaping for three varied reasons.

And three times, Leyland reemerged as manager of another ballclub. Through the years, other clubs have coveted him -- the White Sox, the Red Sox, the Angels. Teams that he rejected.

And ultimately, the Tigers, the team that turned him to managing in the minor leagues when he was 26.

Now as manager of the Tigers, he has been winner unexpectedly of a pennant two years ago in his first season. Followed by a drop back last year.

And then this season, the floundering, the collapse in an atmosphere of great expectations, the lack of energy and hustle displayed by some of his ballplayers, the losing streaks.

The 2008 Tigers -- the most disappointing team in any sport in my 53 years of covering professional games and athletes in Detroit. Most disappointing because the expectations were so huge. A team about which I said, and others agreed, that if it doesn't win the World Series after the trades made last winter, 2008 should be considered a failure.

It has become a failed season -- the Tigers predicted to win the pennant and then the World Series struggling below .500 in mid-August.

So the notion was that Leyland, true to his staunch character when hit by disappointment, negatives beyond his control, might just do what he did in Pittsburgh, Florida and Colorado.

Well, Jim Leyland does not intend to deliver another self-ziggy this season.

"I'm not leaving here if that's what you're getting at," he told me the other day in the manager's office in the clubhouse at Comerica Park.
"They'll have to fire me. I'm very happy here. Let's see how that plays out. I like managing and I've got a lot of energy. So I'm strong, I feel good, I've got a lot of energy and I want to manage."

Stretch drive

These words faced by reports that the Tigers are considering downsizing their payroll. Pooh poohed as fiction and fable by the ballclub itself, according to those whose daily fare is to spend time at the ballpark.

These words despite a rousing victory one day, followed by more lassitude and lack of energy and mistake-prone baseball the next day.

"Let's see how good we can play for a month and a half," Leyland said the other day after one of those rousing victories over the Blue Jays. He had met with his players earlier. Then he relayed the essence of his comments.

"I said I'm going to try to manage my hindquarters off the last month and a half," he said, and I took the liberty of changing one of his words to hind-quarters. "And I said I want you to play your hindquarters off the last month and a half."

Leyland's contract runs through 2009. He punctuates his comments about references to "next year." His plan is to bat Magglio Ordonez in the third spot in the batting order and Miguel Cabrera at cleanup every day in 2009. Behind Curtis Granderson and Placido Polanco. Four .300 guys.

Again it could be an intimidating lineup, frightening -- just as it was designed for 2008 before the lassitude.

His words -- "they'll have to fire me" -- echo. But that could not happen.

Mike Ilitch, whose roots go deep in Detroit baseball history, should never fire, perhaps, the best manager the Tigers have ever had.

Jerry Green is a retired Detroit News sportswriter. Read his Web-exclusive column every Sunday at detnews.com.

Leyland wants to come back so bad in 2009 so the 09 Tigers can be the first Tigers team not to have a CG

Maybe he will die over the winter

I hope so! Sorry

If Illich does want a World Series, we needs a more motivational manager than Leyland.

GO TIGERS!!

GO AWAY LEYLAND

GO TIGERS!!

GO TIGERS

We can probably make an ok run if we wanted to. But I think the playoffs are out of reach.

Go Tigers!!
_________________
"Contrary to what everybody else thinks, I still think I can come back and help this team."

Todd Jones on shoulder injury.

AIN'T OVER YET

Tigers need to win 10 games in a row

MICHAEL ROSENBERG
Jim Leyland wants another chance

BY MICHAEL ROSENBERG • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • September 5, 2008

Jim Leyland admits he has been part of the problem. He intends to be part of the solution, too.

"I hope I sign an extension shortly," said Leyland, who has one year left on his contract. "I don't know if that's going to happen or not. I want to manage a few more years, and I want to manage the Tigers.

"Is that going to happen? I have no idea. That will be up to somebody else. I have a contract for next year. I don't even know if I'm going to be here next year. We could all get fired. But do I want to manage? Yes. And I want to manage the Tigers."

Let's assume that Mike Ilitch wants Leyland back -- a safe bet. The question, then, is twofold:

1. Does Leyland want to manage these Tigers?

The Tigers spent $130 million on a powerful but slow team. Their pitching has been worse than expected, and their defense has not been good. I asked Leyland on Thursday if the Tigers should adjust their model to be more like the Twins, a low-payroll franchise that emphasizes control pitchers, defense and athleticism.

"I think our model is fine," Leyland said. "We just need it tweaked. We need to get (Joel) Zumaya back, we need to get (Jeremy) Bonderman back, we need to see what we've got in (Dontrelle) Willis, and I think we'll be pretty damn good. I think we'll be real good."

2. If he could manage these Tigers again, what would he do differently?

Leyland says that without Bonderman, a productive Willis or Zumaya or Todd Jones for long stretches, this was not the same team that had World Series hopes. True enough. But even with a depleted roster, this team underachieved. From Opening Day, the Tigers were never really in contention, and Leyland said their roster is still better than the team's 67-73 record.

"Well, yeah," he said. "We haven't played better, but we're better than that."

So what happened? The specific answers are easy: Justin Verlander and Nate Robertson and Gary Sheffield and several others have not performed well. But the general answer is tougher. Why have so many players from one team struggled?

"I think that we all did not handle the expectations very well," said Leyland, who points the finger at himself first.

From spring training, when Leyland warned reporters that this season was "a delicate thing," he tried to deal with the expectations. He told his players that high expectations were good. Don't the Yankees have high expectations? Don't the Red Sox?

"We kind of jumped back and went, 'Oh, wow. We've got all these expectations,' " Leyland said. "And all of a sudden, if you're not careful, you can start that, 'Oh, it's not me! It's not me! It's not me!'

"I thought I presented it the best way I knew how, to kind of lay that challenge out to them, to let them know what a good thing it was, and it just didn't work."

Is there any other way he could have handled it?

"I don't know," he said. "I've thought long and hard about it. I don't know."

This is my opinion now, not Leyland's: Something is not quite right in the clubhouse this season. It is too simple to say the effort hasn't been there, and that's probably not accurate, anyway; as Leyland points out, winning teams always seem to try harder than losing teams, but that's not necessarily the case.

From the beginning, this just has not seemed like the loose, aggressive bunch that won in 2006. I don't know how you quantify that. But in discussing what went wrong, Leyland said this:

"Then we lose Bonderman right away, and the Willis thing hasn't worked out to this point, and we had some comfortable reasons ..."

Comfortable reasons. That's a good way to put it. All of a sudden, the team that could not handle high expectations was handed a few excuses: injuries, cold weather, Miguel Cabrera's adjustment to the American League and first base.

Did the players use any of that stuff as a crutch?

"I don't know if it was necessarily a crutch," Leyland said. "But I think that a healthy Zumaya and a healthy (Fernando) Rodney give us more credibility amongst the players.

"That's not to be critical of somebody else. The players aren't dumb. They're smart. You couldn't expect those (other) guys to fill in for Rodney or Zumaya. They're not capable of that. And if I know that, and you know that -- which you do -- then the players know that. It's reality."

Say this for Leyland: He is managing with as much energy and passion as ever, all the way to the finish line. Just this week, he took Verlander to task for saying the strike zone was tight, when the bigger problem was that Verlander's control was too loose.

"I know Justin Verlander is not an excuse-maker," Leyland said. "But I don't want the perception that he is. I had a nice conversation with him yesterday. I told him, 'It doesn't matter what I think. You don't want the perception from the fans or the media that you are an excuse-maker. Sometimes you have to cut it off.' "

Sometimes you have to cut it off.

If only they could do that with the season.

Contact MICHAEL ROSENBERG at 313-222-6052 or mrosenberg@freepress.com

Leyland wants another chance, AND A CONTRACT EXTENSION!

My answer would be H___ NO!

You gotta be kidding me.
Zoom is done.
Kenny is done.
Bondo will take a LOONG time to get back into shape (especially drinking and fishing all day long--not good for the body!).
Verlander needs his ego shot down a couple of notches.
Rodney...eww
Make about 12 of Gala and we're WS-bound!
_________________
There are three things in my life which I really love: God, my family, and baseball. The only problem - once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit. ~Al Gallagher, 1971

Verlander is too good to be sent to the minors

Tigers be a bunch of idiots if they traded him, too

Zumaya ain't done

Bondo will be back

Zoom can't stay well.
Bondo has a gargantuan task ahead of him to get back in shape. He can get it done but it will be hard.
_________________
There are three things in my life which I really love: God, my family, and baseball. The only problem - once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit. ~Al Gallagher, 1971

Hi saint...I knew that's what he liked to do in the offseason, but I just don't think he's jogging, weightlifting, or windsprinting too much just now. Almost like having 2 offseasons in a row...
_________________
There are three things in my life which I really love: God, my family, and baseball. The only problem - once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit. ~Al Gallagher, 1971