Leyland wants another chance to manage Tigers

Jim Leyland admits he has been part of the problem with the Detroit Tigers. He intends to be part of the solution, too.

"I hope I sign an extension shortly," said Leyland, who has one year left on his contract. "I don't know if that's going to happen or not. I want to manage a few more years, and I want to manage the Tigers.

"Is that going to happen? I have no idea. That will be up to somebody else. I have a contract for next year. I don't even know if I'm going to be here next year. We could all get fired. But do I want to manage? Yes. And I want to manage the Tigers."

Let's assume that Tigers owner Mike Ilitch wants Leyland back -- a safe bet. The question, then, is twofold:

1. Does Leyland want to manage these Tigers?

The Tigers spent $130 million on a powerful but slow team. Their pitching has been worse than expected, and their defense has not been good. I asked Leyland on Thursday if the Tigers should adjust their model to be more like the Twins, a low-payroll franchise that emphasizes control pitchers, defense and athleticism.

"I think our model is fine," Leyland said. "We just need it tweaked. We need to get [Joel] Zumaya back, we need to get [Jeremy] Bonderman back, we need to see what we've got in [Dontrelle] Willis, and I think we'll be pretty damn good. I think we'll be real good."

2. If he could manage these Tigers again, what would he do differently?

Leyland says that without Bonderman, a productive Willis or Zumaya or Todd Jones for long stretches, this was not the same team that had World Series hopes. True enough. But even with a depleted roster, this team underachieved. From Opening Day, the Tigers were never really in contention, and Leyland said their roster is still better than the team's sub-.500 record.

"Well, yeah," he said. "We haven't played better, but we're better than that."

So what happened? The specific answers are easy: Justin Verlander and Nate Robertson and Gary Sheffield and several others have not performed well. But the general answer is tougher. Why have so many players from one team struggled?

"I think that we all did not handle the expectations very well," said Leyland, who points the finger at himself first.

From spring training, when Leyland warned reporters that this season was "a delicate thing," he tried to deal with the expectations. He told his players that high expectations were good. Don't the Yankees have high expectations? Don't the Red Sox?

"We kind of jumped back and went, 'Oh, wow. We've got all these expectations,' " Leyland said. "And all of a sudden, if you're not careful, you can start that, 'Oh, it's not me! It's not me! It's not me!'

"I thought I presented it the best way I knew how, to kind of lay that challenge out to them, to let them know what a good thing it was, and it just didn't work."

Is there any other way he could have handled it?

"I don't know," he said. "I've thought long and hard about it. I don't know."

This is my opinion now, not Leyland's: Something is not quite right in the clubhouse this season. It is too simple to say the effort hasn't been there, and that's probably not accurate, anyway; as Leyland points out, winning teams always seem to try harder than losing teams, but that's not necessarily the case.

From the beginning, this just has not seemed like the loose, aggressive bunch that won the American League pennant in 2006. I don't know how you quantify that. But in discussing what went wrong, Leyland said this:

"Then we lose Bonderman right away, and the Willis thing hasn't worked out to this point, and we had some comfortable reasons ..."

Comfortable reasons. That's a good way to put it. All of a sudden, the team that could not handle high expectations was handed a few excuses: injuries, cold weather, Miguel Cabrera's adjustment to the AL and first base.

Did the players use any of that stuff as a crutch?

"I don't know if it was necessarily a crutch," Leyland said. "But I think that a healthy Zumaya and a healthy [Fernando] Rodney give us more credibility amongst the players.

"That's not to be critical of somebody else. The players aren't dumb. They're smart. You couldn't expect those [other] guys to fill in for Rodney or Zumaya. They're not capable of that. And if I know that, and you know that -- which you do -- then the players know that. It's reality."

Say this for Leyland: He is managing with as much energy and passion as ever, all the way to the finish line. Just this week, he took Verlander to task for saying the strike zone was tight, when the bigger problem was that Verlander's control was too loose.

"I know Justin Verlander is not an excuse-maker," Leyland said. "But I don't want the perception that he is. I had a nice conversation with him yesterday. I told him, 'It doesn't matter what I think. You don't want the perception from the fans or the media that you are an excuse-maker. Sometimes you have to cut it off.' "

Sometimes you have to cut it off.

If only they could do that with the season.