Leyland May Think About Moving West

Jim Leyland has always been thought of as an East Coast kind of guy. He rejected a salary/stock option offer from Disney that might have paid him $2 million a year to manage the Angels before leaving Pittsburgh to manage the Florida Marlins in 1997.

Now, although General Manager Dave Dombrowski, nicely using the Dodgers as leverage, has opted to stay in Florida, and prospective new owner John Henry is willing to beef up the payroll, Leyland is expected to have new opportunities to travel.

Maybe as far as Los Angeles.

New Dodger General Manager Kevin Malone may have his sights first set on Montreal Expo Manager Felipe Alou, but Leyland would have to fit in the Alou class at the top of the managerial ladder.

He is 52, in the second year of a five-year contract at $1.5 million a year, but he has a two-week window at the end of the season to exercise a $500,000 buyout clause. Dombrowski, with a new five-year contract of his own, wants him to stay, but Leyland isn’t sure the Marlins can rebuild as quickly as he would like. Henry has said he would raise the payroll to more than $20 million next year, but it might take two years to make the club competitive again.

“If he decides to stay, it means he thinks they can contend in the near future,” said third base coach Rich Donnelly, who has been with Leyland for all 13 of his major league managerial seasons.

“I just can’t see him staying if he doesn’t think that. It’s not his nature. He’s a winner.”

Would he go to the West Coast?

“Jim could manage in a roller rink,” Donnelly said in Florida. “He could manage in any town in any stadium any time. He adjusts.

“He’d go anywhere he thought he could win another championship. His first priority is to his family. Secondly it’s to manage a contender, and then to work with good people.”

Colorado has been mentioned as a possible Leyland destination, but he may have already seen too much of Coors Field’s eccentricities.

His National League team lost an All-Star shootout there, 13-8, this year, and his Marlins scored 20 runs in two games there this week only to lose both to the Rockies, 15-10 and 11-10.

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The players’ strike derailed the 1994 season, changing the course of home run history, perhaps.

It has been forgotten that Matt Williams, now with the Arizona Diamondbacks and then with the San Francisco Giants, had 43 homers with 47 games to play when the strike began on Aug. 11.

“I never think about it,” Williams said, referring to the lost shot at the home run record. “I look around the clubhouse and see what [the union] did [financially] for guys like [rookie] Travis Lee, and how we helped them. I was just one of the guys who walked. There wasn’t any pressure to hit home runs yet because it was only August.”

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The Milwaukee Brewers are headed for their sixth consecutive losing season under Manager Phil Garner, who has one year left on his contract at $600,000. General Manager Sal Bando has been saying that Garner would definitely be back, but three losses to the Diamondbacks have created doubt.

“I didn’t know we’d lose three in a row to an expansion team,” Bando said of his previous remarks. “That was more than anyone could swallow. Now, I think it’s in the best interests of the club to wait until after the season to reevaluate.”