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Jim Leyland and Dave Dombrowski They helped give the Tigers back their roar
Michigan was reunited with an old friend in 2006: baseball. The Tigers -- the state's and the city's oldest professional sports franchise, and a team with a singular ability to raise spirits and ignite passions -- had fallen into a confounding slumber from 1994 to 2005. A proud team and an important sport in the Motor City and throughout Michigan had become a forgettable, even embarrassing, summertime acquaintance. And then arrived two men, at different times, to rekindle the fire during a wondrous, even magical, 2006: Dave Dombrowski and Jim Leyland. Their combined talents and labor helped the Tigers storm to the American League championship and win a ticket into the 2006 World Series. The principal architect, Dombrowski, was hired in November 2001 as Tigers president and chief executive officer. He was an intelligent sandlot athlete from the south side of Chicago who grew up dreaming of becoming a baseball general manager. Years later, in 1997, it was Dombrowski who helped bring the Florida Marlins a World Series championship. He was Tiger owner's Mike Ilitch's choice six years ago to reconstruct and redefine baseball in Detroit. The mission took on greater energy and immediacy five months later, in April 2002, when Dombrowski added "general manager" to his title. He remembers convening a meeting that spring with his top assistants. He had spent five months assessing the organization. The boss' news was blunt: "We've got a lot of work to do." It was Dombrowski, now 50, who changed everything as the Tigers methodically worked to restore their championship luster. He changed players. He changed philosophies. He changed administration. And he changed managers -- three times -- until he found the right match for the right group of players in October 2005: Jim Leyland. Leyland was the sage ship captain the Tigers needed in 2006 as five years of rebuilding finally provided personnel sufficient to contend. But what an emerging team, conditioned for so long to losing, needed was a proven winner who knew how to redirect a team's psyche and its potential. "We had a lot of good players," Leyland said last October, during the height of Detroit's playoff drive, when he was asked about how the transformation had come about. "But we didn't have a good team." Two men joined in 2006 -- in concert with Ilitch, who along the way wrote some expensive checks to big-name players -- to restore baseball's one-of-a-kind relationship with Detroit. The Tigers set a Comerica Park attendance record with 2.59 million paid tickets. They set modern-day marks for television and radio ratings. They made apparel all but mandatory for the well-dressed Detroit sports fan. Throughout a stunning 2006 season, Dombrowski pulled the front-office levers. Leyland took care of brewing the clubhouse's chemistry and teaching a talented team how to win. Last October, as a town celebrated a reunion with its grandest sport, fans across town and across Michigan seemed to smile and sigh, saying in unison three ever-so-sweet words: Baseball is back. Lynn Henning
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Maggie Allesee