Hall of Famer Leyland blazed trail for many protégés

This story was excerpted from Jason Beck’s Tigers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

One of the first calls Derek Shelton received after accepting the Pirates’ managerial job was from someone who recognized the challenge. Shelton just didn’t recognize the phone number when it came in.

“I kept getting this call from a Detroit number and didn’t answer it,” Shelton explained during baseball’s Winter Meetings earlier this month. “Finally, I was [at] dinner one night and sitting with my wife and some friends, and I may have had a glass of bourbon or two, and the phone rang again. I said, ‘I’m going to answer this call.’

“I answered it, and it was this gruff voice: ‘This is Jim Leyland.’

“‘Oh, wow.’ I stood up.”

Leyland offered to take Shelton out to breakfast whenever he got to Pittsburgh. The meeting has become a regular in-season occurrence in the seasons since, often including Pirates coaches (and former Tigers players) Don Kelly and Mike Rabelo, as well as Leyland’s son, Patrick, a manager in the White Sox farm system.

“Right from the get-go, it was a sounding board,” Shelton said.

Shelton isn’t the only one. While there isn’t necessarily a Leyland managerial tree, baseball’s newest Hall of Fame inductee has quietly been a valued mentor for young managers, some of whom have ties to him from their playing days.

A’s manager Mark Kotsay began his 17-year Major League playing career under Leyland with a few weeks as a midseason call-up with the 1997 Florida Marlins. After they retooled following their World Series championship in ‘98, Kotsay became a regular playing for Leyland on a rebuilding team.

The experience shaped Kotsay’s career, first as a player, then as he took on coaching.

“I couldn’t be more proud to have played for Jim,” Kotsay told reporters at the Winter Meetings. “The impact he left on me as a rookie, to this day, of a grinding blue-collar mentality. My image of Jim Leyland is sliding shorts and a cigarette at his desk entertaining the media with no shirt on. The best undressing of a ballclub that I’ve ever heard came from Jim Leyland my rookie year in the old Astrodome. It was Hall of Fame.”

Kotsay interviewed for the Tigers’ managerial opening in 2020 before Detroit hired A.J. Hinch.

“When I interviewed for Detroit, Jim came and picked me up from the hotel,” Kotsay said. “We had a great conversation in the car ride. You could just hear the care and the passion that he has for the game.

“I played [14] games [with the Marlins] for Jim in ‘97 and all of ’98, [the second of] which was a season like the one we just experienced in Oakland this season, and he never wavered. In that limited time, we built a bond that will last forever. He’s Hall of Fame in every way.”

Kotsay isn’t the only player who took the experience from those 1997-98 teams and carried it with him into managing.

“Jim was my first manager in the big leagues essentially,” new Cubs manager Craig Counsell told reporters at the Winter Meetings, “and so I have great fondness for him.”

When Counsell was in limbo in October, weighing whether to leave the Brewers after nine seasons and three division titles, Leyland was a confidant for him. Leyland had been through it himself, having left Pittsburgh for Florida after the 1996 season.

“I was very interested in how he felt about when he eventually left a place that he had been for a long time,” Counsell said. “So I consider him a friend, first of all, but I'm just thrilled for him and so happy for him [to be voted into the Hall of Fame]. He deserves it.

“He is somebody that -- especially as I was thinking about just managing as a job 10 years ago or whatever, he was an inspiration for sure. You're kind of like, ‘Can you live up to somebody like that?’ It's always something you have in the back of your mind.”

Not a bad legacy for a former Double-A catcher.