Each Sunday, I rank the AL Central teams from 1-5 in various categories, and for some fun this week I decided to study the playing careers of the five managers. Ron Gardenhire pokes fun at his playing days a lot, so it was interesting to see how he stacked up with his peers. Gardy came in third, actually, behind Buddy Bell and Ozzie Guillen. Eric Wedge finished fourth, and Jim Leyland fifth.

Leyland heard about it today during his pregame press conference, when a friend of mine, longtime Tigers beat writer Danny Knobler of Booth Newspapers, asked if the skipper had seen the list. “What’s the point?” Leyland grumbled in his classic, grizzled tone. ”I don’t pay attention to silly [stuff].”

A couple minutes passed. Then, I asked Leyland a question about the Twins.

“I was a [lousy] hitter,” he said, with a wry smile, ”but I know a good team when I see one.” He gave me some great stuff that I’ll probably use for an off-day story tomorrow. Leyland spent the whole weekend praising the Twins at a time when many people in Minnesota were disgusted with their play. Tonight, on ESPN, the Twins finally justified the praise.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Around MLB, Twins thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.