How Leyland’s leadership led to Marlins’ first title

This story was excerpted from Christina De Nicola’s Marlins Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

MIAMI – Once the adrenaline wore off from capturing a World Series championship via walk-off fashion, the 1997 Marlins followed manager Jim Leyland’s lead like they had all season.

As Cliff Floyd described it to MLB.com in 2021, the club found a back room at Joe Robbie Stadium to trade stories over cigars while drenched in a combination of beer, sweat and champagne. Leyland wanted everyone to share the floor and say what that ballclub meant to him.

“I think that it certainly helped my cause to get to the Hall of Fame,” said Leyland, who elected not to have a logo on his cap for his plaque. “I don’t think there’s any question about that. I doubt if we hadn’t won it, or won one somewhere, I probably would not have gotten in. So obviously, that’s got to rank right up there. And the emotion was very special for me for this reason. We had come close in Pittsburgh to getting there, and we never quite got there. So I knew how tough it was to get that accomplished. That’s the pinnacle.”

After 11 seasons inside the dugout for the Pirates from 1986-96, Leyland reunited with general manager Dave Dombrowski in South Florida ahead of ’97. Expectations were high in the organization’s fifth year of existence, because the Marlins had added veterans to the lineup and pitching staff.

Dombrowski, who is now the president of baseball operations for the Phillies, knew Leyland was the right person for the job. Not only did he find ways to get the best out of his players every game, but he also wasn’t afraid to give his regulars a day off to get role players involved.

“I think that sometimes people look at managers [and they] don’t get enough credit,” Dombrowski told MLB.com in 2022. “I’m of a different mentality. I think maybe strategically a manager may only win five games during a season, but I think a manager can make a difference between first and last place just by the tone they set, the way they lead things, the mentality, the leadership they provide for the players and that club.

“Even though it was very talented, we had a bunch of new players playing together for the first time, a lot of star players, guys who were kind of brought together that would be a challenge to manage. And Jim Leyland just handled them and handled the group in an unbelievable fashion. And they loved him.”

Look no further than retired slugger Gary Sheffield, who considers Leyland to be like a father. Sheffield remembers Leyland walking with his arm around him from the main Spring Training facility to a side field for a heart-to-heart conversation about how the team would only go as far as he took it.

“He was a big part of my life, bringing that leadership and teaching me how to be a leader amongst men,” Sheffield said in 2022.

One of the many branches on Leyland’s managerial tree, Craig Counsell, agreed. The winning run that late October 1997 evening, Counsell is now arguably the Majors’ most revered skipper.

“I think his best trait was he just had an innate feel for people, the game, a great sense of timing, and that’s what made him great,” Counsell told MLB.com in 2022. “I’ll go back to like, you can’t write a story about the metrics in that, but it’s a skill for managing people that he certainly had. That sense of timing and that sense of understanding where individuals are at to get the most out of them was something he was really good at.”