as far as I’m concerned, to keep this from possibly becoming a distraction. This team has played well overall this season and appears to be a legitimate contender for a post-season berth. Now would be a great time to extend him through 2010, then address anything beyond that after the season.

While I like Lynn Henning’s columns, I don’t agree with it. Watch the Tigers til the All Star break and see what direction we’re headed in. And another thing……….

No extension until HE (Leyland) CAN GIVE AN INTERVIEW WITHOUT A FULL MOUTH OF FOOD. It’s disrespectful, Jim. I don’t care how hungry you are.

and by later I mean wait until the end of the season. Sports culture is so f**ked up in regards to what happens in the real world and what should happen. Where’s the distraction? The only one’s that may make and create a distraction is the flipping media. So what if he has to fight for his job the entire season or anybody else for that matter. Where’s the logic to sign him for three or four more years and then fire him in two? Wait until the season is over, evaluate his performance and then offer a contract, if warranted based on his results. It’s ludicrous that the Tigers would not offer him a contract extension in the off season (which wasn’t deserved) and then offer him one after only barely into a fifth of the season. Freakin Lynn Henning and media causing controversy or we wouldn’t even be talking about this. Let the man have to fight for his job like everyone else.

Give it to him in September as long as the season went well. Around Labor Day is fine.

keep it simple, no playoffs, no contract. make him earn it, dont just hand it to him because they are above .500.

Listen, we’re not going to like every single decision any manager makes. We can nitpick Leyland all we want, but overall he is a good manager.

He as done well this season. It is a relatively small sample size, but we really can’t complain with 17-13 at this point of the season.

Who else are we gonna get that is an order of magnitude better?

Although if we get swept in Minnesota this week my opinion may sour.

I’m digging the small ball that I’ve seen so far this season. I think if he keeps that up, he will deserve a contract extension in September (I agree with you, Kurt)

I think Leyland deserves a contract extension, and the start to this season has nothing to do with it. From the comments of his players, they have a tremendous amount of respect for him. He is a vintage manager.

And speaking as one involved in management decisions, this notion of making someone play for an extension is counter to what we’ve actually learned about labor psychology: better performance, even in high-pressure jobs, is associated with comfort. If he thinks he’s getting paid well, he will give more. This is because nobody really believes others can really fairly assess our performance.

There are cases where this isn’t true. There are players, for example, who need that carrot at the end of the stick to really get the most out of them. Jim Leyland isn’t that kind of person.

If Jim’s looking over his shoulder, then so do his players when things go bad. If he’s going to be here after they’re gone, that gives him more power over his wards. This effect has been delayed because he took most of these guys to a World Series, and many of them are young. If it goes much past the All Star game, and he doesn’t have a contract, and it becomes a bigger story, it will undermine him.

This is hard for me because I grew up a Tram fan, and he will always be my favorite player as Kaline was for my father and Greenberg for his and Wahoo Sam was for his, but at least I was told by a true insider (in 2003 so take with a grain) that the team didn’t really believe in Alan as a manager. They played beneath themselves. They gave each other looks when he suggested something unorthodox. So he stopped suggesting unorthodox things and the writing was on the wall.

These guys believe in Jim. It started with the older fellas, and the guys they brought from the Marlins who won a World Series with him. Jonesey devoted a column to him. Now — this is just gleaned from articles in Detnews, Freep, MLive, etc. — Guillen and Polanco and Magglio are his flag bearers. Granderson and Verlander and Bonderman too have made comments that go beyond the typical ballplayer’s respect for his skipper. And I’m sure by now we realize Inge is Leyland’s Tiger (at least more so than Marian Ilitch’s).

There isn’t a better manager out there that we could get for this club. No manager is going to make perfect decisions. The top managers in the game (Torre, La Russa, Scioscia, Piniella, Gardenhire, Francona) get criticism galore from their home fans.

And if you add it all up, a good manager versus an average manager only gets you a few games or so. Having a complete incompetent like Eric Wedge or Dusty Baker is the only thing that really affects your team negatively. Really, the measure of a manager is whether people will believe in him when he’s losing. And Leyland brings that by the truckload.

The players like him. The fans like him. He likes us. He’s a good manager. And keeping him on a 1-year lease just makes him less effective. Sign the guy and move on.