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."