Leyland wins one for the little guys

By Ray Buck
Special to www.flamarlins.com
Oct. 26, 1997

MIAMI -- Step aside, Atlanta Braves. Pull up a back seat, Bobby Cox. This is to every manager, every coach, every camp instructor, every athlete, everybody who has ever been associated with baseball and paid his dues and thinks the world could treat him a little kinder.

Jim

Jim Leyland's the new standard for perseverance. (Allsport)

Leyland is the new, undisputed standard for perseverance in sports.

And nobody -- I'm talking nobody -- is more deserving of doing a victory lap with a "1997 Florida Marlins World Series Championship" flag waving from his fists than this 52-year-old manager of 33 professional seasons, author of more than 2,000 major-league lineup cards ... and far too many bus rides during 18 minor-league seasons to even count.

"Never give up!" Leyland screamed at the top of his lungs ... to you, to me, especially to every baseball player or manager who has spent a day in the minor leagues.

"It's true! Take it from a Double-A, backup flunky catcher -- and he's standing on this stage tonight," he said.

Wayne Huizenga will have to have his bald head examined if he sells this team, especially to someone who would force Leyland to exercise the escape clause in his five-year, $7-million contract. He will not manage the World Champion Marlins in '98 if an y new ownership would want a puppet-manager to carry out on-field orders.

"Then," Leyland said, "I'm not their man."

NO THREATS. NO SELF-PITY. No kicking and screaming into the night. In fact, there may be a sense of relief that would come with stepping down, on top, after only one year on the job.

There is speculation that Leyland, who is more steel mills and Allegheny River than art deco and Miami Beach, will leave regardless whether or not Huizenga sells. Huizenga is strictly a business man. Leyland is strictly a baseball man who couldn't be m ore set in his ways if you planted his spikes in concrete.

His favorite kind of media is the one-paper town kind, as in Pittsburgh. Both he and his wife, Katy, are small-town people with strong Ohio-Pennsylvania roots, now living in the transient capital of the world -- South Florida.

After his victory lap, Leyland felt self-conscious because of his self-effacing nature. He's had to talk whole rooms full of reporters out of jumping on the obvious story angle in these playoffs about the bespectacled, gray-haired manager who took the Pittsburgh Pirates to the NLCS three consecutive years in the early '90s only to be denied a trip to the World Series each time.

When asked about the victory lap, Leyland said, "I don't know, you get crazy when things like this happen. I made an ass of myself more than once in my life ... (and) I probably did it again tonight."

He quickly -- almost apologetically -- said that he wasn't trying to copy Cal Ripken Jr.'s magical victory lap at Baltimore's Camden Yards two years ago when Lou Gehrig's consecutive-game streak finally fell.

"I wouldn't insult Cal Ripken by taking a lap just because he did," said Leyland. "There's a whole lot of difference between me and Cal Ripken Jr."

A LOT FEWER BUS RIDES through the bushes, for one. At times, Leyland must have felt like a minor-league "lifer" -- and what he said after Game 7 of the World Series on Sunday night may have been the biggest tribute to the minor leagues that anyone has ever made.

"I wanted to remind those guys in winter ball and the instructional leagues, guys like me who weren't very good players ... (and) think they have no chance to get to the major leagues," said Leyland, "this win is dedicated to them."

He made all the right moves -- bullpen, lineup, you name it. He dropped a struggling Bobby Bonilla down to No. 6 in the order before the game - and guess who opened the 11th inning with a single? Bonilla. Guess who hugged longest after the game? Leylan d and Bonilla.

Leyland needed help from Cleveland, which led from the third inning until the bottom of the ninth when Jose Mesa, the so-called Indians closer, allowed the Marlins to tie the score at 2, and then Indians second baseman Tony Fernandez booted a grounder off the bat of Craig Counsell, who eventually scored the winning run.

But that's all the help James Richard Leyland needed Sunday night.

HE LED THE victory parade. After jumping out of the first-base dugout (he barely sat down during extra innings), he ran toward center field, wagged the No. 1 sign with his right hand, circled the warning track in left field and accepte d the championship flag near third base. Then, he waved it for 10 minutes before handing it off to catcher Charles Johnson, whom Leyland always credits for getting this team jump-started after the All-Star break.

The Marlins become not only the first wild-card team to win a World Series but the fastest team ever to ascend to the championship -- a full three years quicker than the '62 expansion New York Mets, who won the World Series ('69) in their eighth season .

Leyland stood on the podium behind second base during the postgame bedlam and physically orchestrated the recorded playing of "We Are The Champions" by Queen as it rocked over the speaker system.

Yes, he probably made an ass of himself. But not until he had shown all of us that it's possible to win even the World Series, if you don't give up.