Look at the Tigers and Jim Leyland now
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BY PHIL ROGERS
Columnist
The Chicago Tribune
Posted on Sat, Jun. 03, 2006
DETROIT - Down 4-0 early, the Detroit Tigers had come back to get within one run of the New York Yankees. They had put the tying run into scoring position twice but failed to get him home, and now it was the ninth inning. That meant Mariano Rivera time for the Yankees and almost certainly a fifth consecutive loss for the Tigers.
Magglio Ordonez tried to think positive, but he understood reality. "Rivera ... he's lights out," Ordonez said.
Except when the bullpen door swung open Thursday night at Comerica Park, it wasn't Rivera coming in. It was Kyle Farnsworth, inheriting a one-run lead because Rivera's back was acting up.
Just as the Tigers had rallied earlier to beat Oakland when reigning Rookie of the Year Huston Street was unavailable, they clubbed Farnsworth for a walk and three consecutive singles in the ninth, stealing a 7-6 victory that ended their losing streak and added a game onto their lead over the White Sox in the American League Central.
"Lucky, huh?" Ordonez said. "It's how you win games."
But Ordonez, the former White Sox All-Star who has found a second home as the Tigers' cleanup hitter, knows it's one thing to get a break and another to take advantage of it.
"The good thing about this team is we never give up," Ordonez said. "We try to get some hits, get some walks and get back in the game. We know we're going to get a good job from our bullpen, which helps. We know we're always going to have a chance to win."
That's exactly the kind of attitude Jim Leyland, the seventh Tigers manager since 1995, was trying to instill during spring training in Lakeland, Fla. It's why Leyland unloaded on his team after a lopsided loss to Cleveland on April 17.
In less than two months, the man who won an unlikely World Series with Florida in 1997 has retrained the long-laughable Tigers, breaking them of the habits that had built up while losing an average of 100 games over the last five years.
While the Tigers had gotten experience for a corps of young pitchers and gone outside the organization to rebuild the lineup around guys like Ordonez, Ivan Rodriguez and Carlos Guillen, lots of people wondered why the 61-year-old Leyland would take an offer to replace Alan Trammell last fall.
Leyland had said he wanted to manage again, but only with a club that could win quickly. He wasn't looking for a building project. It was hard to see how a perennial loser in a division with three strong rivals - the White Sox, Cleveland Indians and Minnesota Twins - would qualify.
But look at the Tigers now.
They had won eight in a row and 15 of 16 before the four-game losing streak that started when Cleveland's Jason Johnson shut them out last Sunday, and have gone 29-12 since a 7-7 start. In the process, they moved past the White Sox in the AL Central and also St. Louis in the bragging-rights battle for the best record in the majors.
Leyland maintained his calm as the Yankees moved onto the verge of a four-game sweep last week. He said he was impressed with his players' approach during the losses.
"People have a tendency to overreact," he said after Thursday's comeback. "We're going to lose four more in a row sometime this year, I can assure you of that. I wasn't going to overreact, not going to put too much emphasis on these games. It's nice to get a win for us. I wouldn't be in here pouting if we had lost the game."
When the Tigers lost the first three games of the Yankees series, Leyland knew that some saw it as the beginning of the end.
After all, Boston would follow the Yankees into Comerica Park and then the Tigers travel to Chicago for three games against the defending World Series champs at U.S. Cellular Field. It was time for Cinderella's coach to turn into a pumpkin.
Leyland, however, looks at baseball as a business, not a fairy tale, and his team as a legitimate competitor, not a bunch of men under some magical spell.
"Maybe at some point somebody will say, `Hey, they're pretty good,'
" Leyland said. "Instead, people are saying that when they start to play tough teams, they're done. We're not as good as the Yankees yet. That's what we're working toward. But it doesn't mean we're going to go away. We're going to battle our (butts) off."
Ordonez joined the Tigers after the intersection of a knee injury and his rejection of a long-term contract extension with the White Sox. It wasn't the most graceful of exits, as he exchanged some barbs with manager Ozzie Guillen and general manager Ken Williams after pulling on a Detroit uniform. But even if it had been, he still would have been miserable last October.
His old team was winning the World Series, and his new one had just finished 20 games below .500.
"I didn't see many games against Boston, the Angels, but I watched the World Series," said Ordonez, who spent eight years with the White Sox. "It was sad. I left the way I left, a year earlier, and now my old team was winning the World Series. It was sad."
Ordonez's fondest wish is that the Tigers can be the new White Sox. There are some obvious parallels, which he acknowledges - the fast start, the fan support coming out of the woodwork - but he isn't getting carried away.
Not yet.
"It's early," he said.
Among the similarities been these Tigers and those Sox:
1 Pitching, pitching, pitching.
The biggest key to the White Sox's 99-victory season was their pitching staff cutting 1.3 runs per game off the staff earned-run average, from 4.91 to 3.61. The Tigers, who were eighth in the American League with a 4.51 ERA a year ago, lead the league at 3.60.
Like last year's White Sox, the Tigers have been strong in both the rotation and the bullpen. It's a far cry from 2003, when they lost 119 games, the most in AL history.
Three-fifths of Detroit's rotation - Jeremy Bonderman, Mike Maroth and Nate Robertson - was around for the nightmare of `03. Maroth lost 21 games that year, Bonderman 19 and Nate Cornejo (now with the White Sox's Double-A affiliate) 17.
Bonderman, the youngest player in the league that year, has developed into an All-Star caliber starter. Maroth and Robertson have been solid, and newcomers Kenny Rogers and Justin Verlander have provided major lifts. Jose Contreras and Freddy Garcia played those roles for Guillen's White Sox.
Verlander, the Tigers' first-round pick in 2004, and reliever Joel Zumaya are among the league's hardest throwers. Zumaya's fastball hit 100 m.p.h. on the Comerica radar gun Thursday, while Verlander topped out at 96. Leyland said he was trying to be too cute because he was facing the Yankees.
Health of the starting pitchers, and invaluable catcher Ivan Rodriguez, could be the biggest thing the Tigers need to have some staying power. They already have suffered one casualty, with Maroth expected to miss up to three months after undergoing surgery Friday to remove bone chips from his elbow.
Roman Colon, who starts Sunday against Boston, will be only the sixth starter Leyland has had to use. That's the same number Guillen had for the season in 2005.
2 A change of management.
Guillen needed two years to help transform the White Sox from a mediocre team to a pennant winner. He never had managed anywhere before taking his job, however. Leyland had managed 14 years with three teams, handling the likes of Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, Gary Sheffield and Kevin Brown.
Trammell, a favorite of Tigers fans as a Hall of Fame-caliber shortstop, had shown infinite patience for the players he managed. It was clear from the start that things were going to be different with Leyland.
"We all got a letter from him, and you could tell it was written by him, not a secretary of somebody else," said center fielder Curtis Granderson, a University of Illinois-Chicago product. "I got excited reading it. I even showed it to my parents."
Leyland promised all of his players an even shot, as long as they pulled an equal share of the load.
"He said, `I'm going to expect you, no matter who you are, player 25 or the best player on the team, to work,''' Granderson said. "He said, `I'm not going to treat anybody differently. I'm not going to give in to anybody just because they're so and so.' And that's the way it has been."
A burnout case in Colorado, Leyland spent the last five years as a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals. He has said that watching the Cardinals convinced him that modern players could play the game the right way, as long as it was demanded of them. He's not as quotable as Guillen, but that belief is similar.
3 An igniter.
Good leadoff men are rare in baseball. The White Sox, who were without one for about a decade after Lance Johnson slowed down, had to trade power hitter Carlos Lee to the Milwaukee Brewers to get one in Scott Podsednik. The Tigers developed one.
A year ago Trammell tried nine different hitters in the leadoff spot, with Brandon Inge and Placido Polanco getting the most time. That group combined for a .349 on-base percentage and scored 98 runs. The 25-year-old Granderson entered the weekend with a .380 on-base percentage and had eight home runs, more than any other AL leadoff man except Cleveland's Grady Sizemore.
4 Rewards from calculated risks.
When you are running the Detroit Tigers, and you haven't had a winning season since 1993 or played in a playoff game since 1987, you know you're not going to win too many bidding wars with the Yankees, Red Sox or other top teams for free agents. You have to be bold, you have to be creative.
General manager Dave Dombrowski, who started his career as an assistant to Roland Hemond with the White Sox, has been both. Sometimes decisions explode like trick cigars; that was the case with the three-year deal for closer Troy Percival, who barely had three weeks left in his arm at the time of the deal. But sometimes they pay off huge.
That's true with Rodriguez and is becoming the case with Ordonez, whose surgically repaired left knee_the one that required a trip to Austria for shock-wave therapy_is feeling so good that he even stole a base Friday against Boston. He was hitting .315 with a team-high 12 home runs and 39 runs batted in.
Both Rodriguez and Ordonez signed large, conditional contracts with the Tigers because other teams_the Cubs chief among them_were scared off by questions about their health.
They landed Rogers because his shove of a television cameraman in Texas had caused most other teams to overlook how well his left arm was still working at age 41. Rogers outdueled Curt Schilling over seven innings Friday but was denied his eighth victory when Boston won 3-2 on Kevin Youkilis' ninth-inning homer.
5 A willingness to get dirty for a blue-collar fan base.
Leyland, a Marlboro Man in the age of clean-air laws, wears a black Tigers pullover and has hair a shade of gray that Sparky Anderson could appreciate. He's about as likely to trade in his mustache for a soul patch as he is to walk Tadahito Iguchi to get to Jim Thome.
Leyland doesn't use Ken Williams' favorite word, "grinder," but he speaks the same language in terms of the effort he expects from his players. He can live with a loss, as long as it wasn't the result of players coasting.
"These guys give me a good day's work, and fortunately they get a good day's pay," Leyland said. "The fans work hard for their money; we try to earn some of their entertainment dollars. ... (Lately) they think we earned some of their money."
That's all he can ask for now. But there's a twinkle in his eye that tells you he thinks the stakes will get higher the longer he and these players are together. |
