Jerry Green

Jim Leyland might've just hired his eventual successor: Tommy Brookens

The Big League ball managers form an elite lodge in which the entire membership has studied the same book.

Each of the managers is obsessed with the pitch count, most times even when the starter is some giant in control of the ballgame. The pitch count reaches 100 or 110 and the manager must make an appearance and wigwag to the bullpen. It is though the command has been etched in the book.

Each of the managers, certainly, operates on the theory that a left-handed pitcher has an advantage over a left-handed batter. And so it is in modern Major League Baseball that managers tinker and scratch and squirt sunflower seeds onto the dugout steps. Some consult computer printouts with consummate data on how a batter has fared against this particular pitcher as far back as 2001.

Beyond that, each manager is aggressively protective of his own butt. He is aware the basic rule of the elite lodge is that the day the manager is hired, the rest of the trip is full of peril, spills and chasms.

"Hired to be fired," is a cliché within the lodge.

Good work, if you can get it

Membership is restricted. There are only 30 members in this elite lodge at one time. And they all behave as though they had been cloned from Sparky Anderson.

So it is the manager customarily hires only his most trusted best friends to serve on his staff. Generally, those who are craggy and past their primes and not considered threats.

Becoming a rookie manager on a major league ballclub requires certain steps on the ladder of experience. First, an ambitious young manager must gain practical experience handling fuzz-faced kids in the bus leagues in the deep minors. Then he must rise through the system, level after level.

And only then, if the ambitious young manager shows some mettle and potential, his next step is getting hired to serve as a coach on a major league ballclub. He hits fungos and relays signs and does some teaching. He works as an apprentice.

Then perhaps, if he is fortunate, the ambitious, now middle-aged coach could be elevated to a manager in the majors. Usually on a different ballclub from which he developed his roots.

The boss never wants to feel endangered by having his own successor in his dugout. The ancient protection rule.

That's how the system operates.

And that is why Jim Leyland has displayed enormous courage and character plus a powerful sense of security in hiring his probable successor to his coaching staff.

Working his way up

Tommy Brookens, 56, was ready to return to the big leagues to continue his apprenticeship as a coach.

He already has been a successful manager at the Tigers' farm clubs in Oneonta, West Michigan and Erie. Brookens was prepared for the next step upward. And that was obvious when he spoke with baseball intelligence and a sense of humor during a lengthy discussion we had six weeks ago at the reunion of the 1984 Tigers champions at Comerica Park.

Brookens was smiling and eager. His ambition is to become a manager on a major league club. As a coach under Leyland, Brookens now is on the brink of entering the elite lodge of managers.

There is a quaint irony in his promotion. Once upon a time -- some 30 years ago now -- Leyland was groomed to become a major league manager in the same farm system as Brookens. Leyland spent 11 seasons as a minor league manager in the Tigers' system. He had been successful, starting at the bottom right to Triple-A.

He was ready to be elevated to become a coach at the big league level. He had earned a promotion.

Except Leyland's rise within the Tigers' organization was abruptly halted, in 1982.

The manager of the Tigers, an improving ballclub at the time, destined to win a World Series two years later, was Sparky Anderson.

Braver than most

There were many times, I've believed, that Sparky was co-author of, "The Guidebook To Becoming a Major League Manager."

George Anderson, as brilliant and as successful as he was as a major league manager, would never hire Jim Leyland to work as a coaching apprentice in the Detroit dugout. It mattered not that Leyland, as bright in baseball details as he was, had produced several of the players Sparky played on his Detroit championship team.

Leyland's ascent in the Detroit organization was scrapped, simply because he represented a threat to Sparky and his job security.

So Tony La Russa, then managing the White Sox, brought the rebuffed Leyland to the major leagues as a coach. La Russa was confident and secure. And in four seasons, Leyland was groomed, ready -- and the Pirates hired him for his first gig as a major league manager.

Now Anderson's protection of his status when he rejected Leyland some 27 years ago cannot be confirmed. Except by logic. It has been denied. Just as it was denied when Phil Garner was hired to manage the Tigers in 2000 and Alan Trammell left the coaching staff. For the simple reason: Garner protecting the seat of his pants.

That is the way it works, almost always.

And that is why Leyland is a rare species of manager -- and more importantly a rare species of man. His courage overwhelms any hint of jealousy and fear about job loss.

It could be another two or three seasons from now. But Leyland has hired -- I believe -- the next manager of the Tigers, his successor in Brookens. Brookens -- trained at the Tigers' farm in Evansville by manager Leyland to play third base for Anderson on his 1984 world champions.

Jerry Green is a retired Detroit News sportswriter. Read his Web-exclusive column every Sunday at detnews.com.