Recalling Leyland's Road to Cooperstown

The Tigers' manager knew people as well as baseball, and now son Patrick is following in his footsteps as a successful minor league skipper

Jim Leyland and Steve Kornacki at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa during spring training in 2024.

By Steve Kornacki

Congratulations to Jim Leyland for his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown on Sunday. When someone dedicates their life to a game, gets superb results and displays such passion for it all…well, it’s something to cherish and applaud.

Jim became a friend when I covered his Detroit Tigers teams for MLive.com and FoxSportsDetroit.com, and I also wrote about his Florida Marlins for the Orlando Sentinel. I appreciate that he genuinely cared for me and others in the media, asking about our health and personal lives – you name it. He cared.

And his players loved him, too.

He would move around the dugout and field prior to every game, talking briefly with each and every player on his team, and I asked him about that.

“It’s important,” Leyland said. “I need to know what’s going on in their lives and in the game.” He said most queries were quite quick, but he knew the tone and body language of the individuals well enough to know if something was wrong. And he would ask about anything bothering them to ease their minds.

That’s a great lesson in leadership. If those you lead know you truly care about them, they will run through brick walls for you. And that is what all of his players did for him. Torii Hunter told me one of the biggest reasons he signed as a free agent with Detroit was a chance to play for Jim – a skipper he’d come to admire greatly during their on-field chats.

We had many memorable conversations, but there was something unforgettable about my call to Jim on the morning we learned Mark Fidrych had died tragically in a farming accident.

He praised “The Bird” and then began sobbing. It was very real, very emotional. I told Jim I would let him go and talk to him at the ballpark. There, he pulled me aside and told me that Fidrych was so special to him “because he treated me like a king and I was nobody.” Leyland was managing Detroit’s Class A team in the Florida State League, and Fidrych – the biggest star in baseball in 1976 -- was there at times on injury rehabilitation assignments.

And now his own son, Patrick Leyland, is following in his footsteps by managing in the Chicago White Sox chain. His Kannapolis (N.C.) Cannon Ballers are 50-37 in the Class A Carolina League.

Neither father nor son – an eighth-round pick by Detroit in 2010 – could reach the majors as minor league catchers in the Tigers’ farm system. But they quickly became managers when that dream wasn’t realized. So, the circle of life, baseball style, is playing out for them.

Jim is a baseball lifer who has touched many lives, giving back as surely as he received love.

“Skip,” take a bow. Well done.

You’ve been a master of the people game as well as baseball games. And you knew full and well just how much they went together.

Notes: Jim actually clicked the selfie photo of us before a spring training game this year at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, home of the New York Yankees.

I hope you were fine with me sharing this with our Wolverine-centric audience. Many Michigan fans are Tiger fans, and I thought it would be appreciated. But if you want a very distant Michigan connection, Patrick Leyland committed to play baseball at Maryland, then coached by future Wolverine coach Erik Bakich.