On the Friday before the All-Star break, Jim Leyland and Tony La Russa — formerly great managers, forever great friends — couldn’t seem to get off the phone with each other.
First, they combed through the beginning of Leyland’s Hall of Fame induction speech, which he is to give Sunday during a ceremony (12:30 p.m., MLB Network) where Adrian Beltre, Todd Helton and Joe Mauer also will be welcomed into baseball’s Cooperstown, New York, holy place. Then, Leyland read the end, which led to even more discussion.
“Wait ’til you hear it,” La Russa said. “It’s brilliant.”
Later on, one or the other’s phone rang again. They hadn’t chopped up and hashed the latest Tigers and White Sox games yet, and this simply had to be done because, well, this duo and their unbreakable routine of baseball conversation goes way the hell back to 1979.
“He calls me the worst special adviser in the history of baseball,” said La Russa, in that very role for the losingest Sox team ever. “I tell him I agree.”
Perhaps only Leyland could give La Russa that kind of business and make him chuckle while doing so. Something has drawn these 79-year-olds (La Russa is two months older) to each other since they met as rival managers of the Tigers’ and Sox’ Triple-A teams in the American Association. It must have been, each reckons, how alike they were from the get-go.
“We started talking and just hit it off,” Leyland said.
“It was real evident we both had about the same experience — 5, 6 years old and falling in love with the game,” La Russa said.
By 25, Leyland was a manager in the Tigers organization. Ten years later, in 1982, he got his first major league shot as La Russa’s third-base coach with the Sox. La Russa had landed a top job first, but Leyland had put in several more seasons in pro ball as a manager and both men figured his ascension to big-league skipper was inevitable.
That it was. Heading into the 1986 season, the Pirates hired Leyland. One of his first moves was to bring a minor-league manager named Gene Lamont to Pittsburgh to talk about being a third-base coach. Leyland, not wanting to make a stir in the press, was extra-careful to keep it cloak-and-dagger.
“I said, ‘Jim, what are we doing?’ ” Lamont recalled. “We could walk right down the streets of Pittsburgh and no one would know who we are.”
Leyland and Lamont’s own relationship would grow strong as Carnegie steel. After Lamont was relieved of his managerial duties by the Sox 31 games into the 1995 season, Leyland was the first to throw him a lifeline, hiring him back on the Pirates staff for 1996. A year later, Leyland was en route to a World Series title with the upstart Marlins, Lamont having taken over on the top step of the dugout in Pittsburgh.
“I’d like to think it was all merited in my case,” Lamont said. “But, sure, when your best friend gets fired, I guess you look out for him if you can.”
Lamont, 77, got to Cooperstown on Friday. La Russa was on his way, too, though only after scoffing at the “dumbest question ever” from a reporter who asked if he’d be there for Leyland’s big moment.
“Hell, yeah,” La Russa said. “I’d walk there.”
Leyland is 18th all-time in managerial wins (1,769) and led teams — two of them in Detroit — to three World Series. But those credentials don’t do him justice, according to his closest friends in the game.
“People say he could manage a bad team and make them better,” said Lamont, a regular golf partner of Leyland’s in Sarasota, Florida, where both spend winters. “But the way Jim handled a game, the way he didn’t go by the book, the way he wasn’t afraid to make a decision — maybe that’s what separates him.”
La Russa, who went into the Hall in 2014, goes further.
“In our time, there have been a lot of great managers,” he said. “I believe Jim Leyland is No. 1.”
La Russa and Leyland always looked out for each other. With the Sox, way back when — both still in their 30s — La Russa encouraged Leyland to sit in on press conferences in order to hear the media’s questions. The point: If you’re afraid of what they’re going to ask, you’ll never hack it. In a recent teleconference with reporters, Leyland said, “I kept that with me my entire career.”
La Russa relied on Leyland’s experience, too, in those days and over the decades to come. Between them, they won well over 4,000 games and probably are in the same ballpark when it comes to the number of their phone calls.
“I’ve told a lot [new] managers over the years, ‘If you can, find a relationship like Jim and I had,’ ” La Russa said. “There are a lot of decisions to make over a game, a number of them that are really hairy. Even if those decisions are successful — but especially if they’re not — if you have somebody you can go to after the fact and ask for an honest judgment, that’s huge for your development.”
There were also some epic conversations in Pittsburgh and St. Louis when La Russa and Leyland were managing division rivals at the same time. After one game at Busch Stadium, they joined Cardinals icon Mike Shannon at his restaurant to talk ball. By 2 a.m., Shannon couldn’t take it anymore and said, “Whenever you’re ready to leave, the door will lock behind you.”
“We walked outside at 6:15,” La Russa said.
They walk together as Hall of Famers from here.
