Success Came Late to Leyland

It was a nice thing that Jim Leyland was voted National League Manager of the Year. He paid a lot of dues for a lot of years and justice isn’t always so poetic.

He won the East Division championship with the Pirates, which put him in the company of the elite for the first time in his life. His humanity was welcome.

He told of the 1962 Studebaker and of seasons living in the manager’s office at the ballpark, and of the 82-year-old man the team bus would take to the ballpark every day. There is a volume of those stories that Leyland stored away in all those years in the minor leagues. They define him.

He worked all of those years in the minor leagues -- as low as they get -- beginning in 1964, and he doesn’t brush those years away. “A lot of times my brother Tom would lend me money so I could get through the season,” Leyland recalled. “And he’s a priest.”

In one early offseason Leyland was working in a glass factory near home at Perrysburg, Ohio, and bought a used 1962 Studebaker Lark. Green, with paint that was turning chalky. If you once saw one of those, you’d never forget it.

“It was really ugly,” Leyland said. “Bad. I can remember driving it around and my dad sitting on the glider on the porch. I’d come home and he’d ask why I was sweaty.

“I was driving around town with the windows up so people would think I had air-conditioning.”

Some seasons later, he went from $400 a month playing to $6,000 for the 1971 season to be a manager for the first time. “I bought a new Bonneville,” Leyland said. “It was beautiful. But it would sit in the driveway because I couldn’t pay for the gas.”

Lou Piniella is a nice fellow and he earned the success he had managing the Cincinnati Reds, but he’s had success for a long time. A fruitful playing career changes a lot of life. The great revelations are an Earl Weaver, who never played in the big leagues but treasured a childhood foul ball collected from the bat of Johnny Hopp; a Sparky Anderson, who played one marginal season in the big leagues and recalled, in the time of his first winner as manager, how he had set the one-week record for dinette sets assembled at the plant in South Dakota.

And Leyland.

“I don’t even have Triple-A experience,” he said during the National League playoffs. “I was a Double-A backup catcher, f’chrisakes. This is a pretty big thrill. I’m loving it. I worked real hard, but there are a lot of good baseball guys who aren’t getting a pension who were as sharp as me. This is for them.”

He went off from Perrysburg in 1964 as a hometown hero to play in the Detroit Tigers’ system and was told by Hoot Evers that first spring, Leyland said, “I might have to be a manager.”

He didn’t hit enough to be any kind of a player, but the Tigers thought enough of him to keep him around, and Leyland wouldn’t quit. He recalled that he’d have come home and gone to college, tried to become a high school coach, but he loved to make it as a player. “I was the happiest SOB in the minors,” he said. “Sometimes I’d end up the season with a dollar in my pocket. How much do you need?”

He was 27 years old when Frank Carswell, the manager of Bristol in the Appalachian League took sick and the job was offered. Leyland knew it wasn’t going to sidetrack his slim big-league possibilities as a player. It made him a manager.

As little as Leyland was making, he got by. Sometimes he rented an apartment, sometimes he’d live with a family in town and sometimes the best place was living in the clubhouse. “I don’t say I lived in all the clubhouses,” he said. “Sparky had this carpeted office in Lakeland that was really nice.”

Clinton, Iowa, part of Quad Cities -- a rookie league -- was more like it. “I had 42 kids and no coach to help,” Leyland said. “I’m also general manager for handing out meal money and making bus and motel arrangements. I got stuck doing all that.

“I’d get up, go to the bank and go to the park at 8:30 to have a workout for 19 kids at 9. At 3:30 in the afternoon I’d have another group. And then again at 5:30 for the kids who were playing in the game. After the game I’d have to write a report on each of them. I didn’t have a coach. That’s why I can’t throw too good any more after throwing two hours a day for all those years.”

Clinton, Iowa, was one of those Norman Rockwell baseball towns where the ladies baked pies for the players. And Earl Fenn was 82 years old. The players called him “The Growler.” Each day at 3 in the afternoon the bus would pick him up in front of his porch on the way to the park, and drop him off after the game. “I’d put him in the first seat,” Leyland said. “I got him in the Medicare section at the ballpark.

“I told him when I went to the mound, if he wanted me to take the pitcher out, light a match. He did.”

The year they won the division championship players poured champagne over The Growler’s head. The next day The Growler took his eyeglass case out of his pocket and champagne ran out.

In 1982 Tony La Russa took Leyland with him to be third base coach with the Chicago White Sox. “Hoot Evers made me a manager; La Russa made me a big-league manager,” Leyland said. La Russa would bring Leyland into the office after the games to see and hear the questions the press asked.

Leyland says he paid back the money he borrowed from his brother Tom.

During that time with the White Sox, Earl Fenn, The Growler, died. Leyland drove the four hours each way to go to the funeral. “He was great,” Leyland said. “Those are relationships you don’t have up here.”

A man shouldn’t have too much too soon.