Jim Leyland has given his life to baseball, and now he'll be immortalized for it.
Leyland has been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame and will be inducted in the class of 2024 this summer, it was announced Sunday night during MLB's Winter Meetings. It's a well-deserved honor for one of the most successful managers of all time.
Leyland doesn't just rank 18th in MLB history with 1,769 managerial wins. He won almost everywhere he went. He led the Pirates to three division titles at his first stop, then took over a losing Marlins team and immediately captured the 1997 World Series title. He finished his career by bringing the moribund Tigers back to prominence, leading the team to three division titles and two AL Pennants from 2006-13 -- a baseball renaissance in Detroit.
Including one year with the Rockies, every team that Leyland inherited had a losing record the previous season. He still posted an all-time record of 1,769-1,728, which helps explain why he was a three-time Manager of the Year, tied for fourth most ever with the likes of Dusty Baker and Terry Francona. He also managed Team USA to the 2017 World Baseball Classic title.
Francona was sitting in the manager's office in the visitor's clubhouse in Detroit before managing the final game of his own Hall of Fame career this season when he said that Leyland is "the gold standard, in my opinion, and I’ll never change that. When you think of a manager, I’m like, man, that’s him."
Now 78 and a special assistant to the Tigers front office, Leyland has been working in baseball since starting out as a minor league catcher with the Tigers at the age of 19, and later becoming a minor league manager for the Tigers at the age of 27. He broke into the majors in 1982 as Tony La Russa's third base coach for the White Sox and rose to manager of the Pirates in 1986. He would spend 22 years as a big-league skipper.
"I signed with the Tigers in 1963 and finally got to Detroit in 2006, so I waited a long time," Leyland said with a laugh Sunday night on MLB Network. He added that he's "going to the Hall of Fame because of the players" he was able to manage, several of whom reached out to him after the news.
"I’ve got about 84 text messages already and I don’t even know how to text, so I’m in trouble I think," he cracked. "It’s all about the players. When you go to the Hall of Fame as a manager, you’ve been blessed with a lot of great players."
Future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander, who played under Leyland for the duration of Leyland's tenure in Detroit, was one of the first to publicly congratulate his former skipper Sunday night, admitting that he was "so nervous" when they met at spring training in 2006 when Verlander was 23 and trying to make the Tigers. He'd go on to win Rookie of the Year.
"You were already a legend!" Verlander wrote on X. "You quickly became more than just a manager but a friend ... Thank you for your faith in me from the beginning!"
Former Tigers catcher Alex Avila, who played under Leyland for five seasons of his 13-year career, said Leyland "really understood how to motivate and communicate with his players better than anyone I played for. He knew how to bring out the best in all of us! Skip belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and I’m so honored and proud to have played for him."
Leyland was elected by the Contemporary Baseball Era Non-Players Committee, securing 15 votes from the 16-person panel that featured Hall of Famers Jim Thome, Tom Glavine and Chipper Jones and Hall of Fame manager Joe Torre.
Of the eight nominees on this year's Contemporary Baseball Era Non-Players ballot, which also included managers Cito Gaston, Davey Johnson and Lou Piniella, Leyland was the only one to earn admission to Cooperstown.
"I can't thank baseball enough," Leyland said. "It's been my life and I owe a lot of this to the game itself."