As the baseball season rounds the back turn and heads into the homestretch, the national media's unhealthy man-crush on Jim Leyland has officially made the leap into a full-blown love affair. It's almost impossible to turn on ESPN these days without being told what a great manager Leyland is, how he's turned the Tigers around, how he's one of the smartest skippers in baseball, how he's a lock to win the American League Manager of the Year award. The whole thing is starting to drive me bonkers.

My problem is not with Leyland, who has proven over his career that he can do a good job when given the necessary tools. His success with the Pirates, for instance, came at about the same time Barry Bonds was breaking out as an MVP-caliber player and ended when Bonds bolted to San Francisco, while the 1997 Marlins' lineup featured Bobby Bonilla (in his last good season), Edgar Renteria, Moises Alou and Gary Sheffield. And this year, he inherited a team from Alan Trammell that included a crop of great young starting pitchers (Bonderman, Verlander, Miner) and several seasoned veterans (Magglio Ordonez, Ivan Rodriguez, Todd Jones, Kenny Rogers).

I'm not denying that Leyland's managerial style has helped the Tigers realize their potential in a way they weren't able to under Trammell, but there is a limit to the number of wins a manager can win or lose for his team over the course of a season. It's a rough measure, but the good Pittsburgh teams of the early 1990s generally won between two and four more games than they should have according to the Pythagorean Win Theorem. This might be attributable to luck or statistical variance, but we can also credit Leyland with pushing the right buttons to get his club those victories. The 2005 Tigers won 71 games; their 2006 counterparts have already reached 79 and are on pace to hit 106. (The Pythagorean Wins for the Tigers is 101; the five added wins is right in line with Leyland's past totals.) Even if this is a spectacular year for Leyland, his managerial Magnum Opus, he can't possibly be credited with an increase of 35 wins from one season to the next.

Of course, try telling that to the media, which has covered up its uncertainty on how to deal with the Tigers unfathomable season by focusing the bright lights on Leyland and proclaiming his style to be just short of genius. Yahoo Sports! writer Jeff Passan, for example, recently wrote of Leyland, "There is something special with him, and there always has been, from his years in Pittsburgh turning a dormant franchise into a three-time division winner to 1997 when he won the World Series with the Florida Marlins." Leyland was in Pittsburgh for four seasons before making the playoffs in 1990 - what was special about those years (and why did the team begin to win division titles when Bonds emerged as a superstar and stop when he moved to another team)? And it's true that he got a bad deal in Florida, losing almost his entire starting lineup after winning the World Series in 1997, but shouldn't a smart, passionate manager have been able to figure out some way to coax a few more wins out of a young team in 1998? Or in Colorado in 1999, where he stayed for a season before moving on because he had lost his passion for the game?

Look at it this way: the most celebrated teachers in our schools are not the ones who get a little extra out of the super talented kids, but the ones who go out of their way to help the students who have been written off as lost causes.

Don't get me wrong, Jim Leyland is a very good manager who made a great decision when he accepted the job offer from the Tigers last winter. He knew that the team was not as far away from winning as it had seemed the past few seasons, with those great young arms on the horizon and the veteran leadership to show them the way. His "stay out of the way" mindset (“I fill that card out and hope they do good,” he told Passan) has allowed him to gain the trust and respect of his players by placing those leadership roles in their laps while still maintaining the sense that this is his team. The laid back atmosphere has undoubtedly resulted in a few extra wins, with his on-field work probably yielding a few more. But when it comes down to it, it appears the person with the best understanding of where those extra thirty wins are coming from is Leyland himself. When reminded of the World Series victory in 1997, he replied, “Players got me the ring. I didn’t get it.”

Watching David Ortiz play the game of baseball, I think I know what it was like to watch Ted Williams in 1941, Carl Yastrzemski in 1967 and Jim Rice in 1978. Those three are possibly the most dominant offensive seasons by Red Sox hitters in the past seventy years, the defining campaigns in careers that carried Williams and Yaz to the Hall of Fame and Rice right up to the front door.

Ortiz' 2006 has been, to this point, on a par with any of those seasons. As the calendar flips over to August, he is on a pace that would not only lead him past the Sox single season homerun record (Jimmie Foxx's 50 in 1938) but close to Roger Maris' American League mark of 61, which somehow withstood the massive homerun barrage of the late 1990s and early 2000s. In addition, he could become just the third major leaguer since 1938 to drive in more than 160 runs in a season.

Despite the level of dominance associated with all three of the above mentioned seasons - Williams' .406 average, Yaz's Triple Crown, Rice's 406 total bases - and the fact that Ortiz is statistically on a par with any of them, Big Papi has a chance to take it a step further, to a place that few players in any sport have reached. He has a chance to not only turn in an exceptional season, but to carry his team to victory while doing so.

In recent weeks, the Red Sox have shifted from division favorites to a team that is barely hanging on. Several formerly steady contributors (including Jason Varitek, Trot Nixon, Keith Foulke, Matt Clement and Tim Wakefield) are currently on the disabled list. The pitching staff in particular is in tough shape, consisting of one reliable starter (Curt Schilling), one starter who has shown flashes of brilliance (Josh Beckett), a lights out closer (Jonathan Papelbon) and an uninspiring combination of youngsters and veterans who are doing their best to keep the ship afloat.

With the team in danger of sinking and the Yankees only getting stronger, acquiring Cory Lidle and Bobby Abreu and expecting Gary Sheffield and Hideki Matsui back at some point, the Red Sox needed something to go their way in the days following the trade deadline and Varitek's knee injury. They received it in the form of Big Papi's bat, which delivered two game winning hits in three days earlier this week against the Angels and Indians before helping vanquish the Devil Rays last night with two mammoth solo homeruns. It appears that Ortiz plans to pick his teammates up, place them on his broad shoulders and carry them for as long as he possibly can. It is a role that suits few, requiring the mental toughness to raise individual level of play to make up for team shortcomings.

Who knows how long Ortiz will help carry his teammates. Schilling rediscovered the ability to take his game up a notch tonight, allowing Papi the opportunity to step in and be the hero, and Mark Loretta contributed a walk-off hit of his own against Cleveland on Wednesday night, but there are still question marks that need to be addressed - can Beckett avoid the long ball, can Javy Lopez still contribute as a starting catcher, will Craig Hansen emerge as a lockdown middle reliever? Until those areas are resolved - perhaps I should say if those areas are resolved - I for one am glad that Ortiz has shown the willingness to shoulder the load and lead the team in the right direction.