DETROIT -- Fortified by victory, with a second World Series appearance secured in his palm and a smoke in the other, Jim Leyland is the bridge. He's the bridge to Sparky Anderson, the last great manager of the last great team in this town, the connective tissue between the good years, when the world looked up at Detroit, before the dwindling population, the unemployment, and the team he inherited that once lost 119 games, and now, where baseball again reigns.

He's the bridge between the hardhats, the working class, the retired and the downsized, the auto men and the ironworkers and the roofers who remember cracking a beer to Sparky's Boys -- Trammell and Whitaker, Morris and Gibson -- and today's more complicated, multicultural team of Cabreras and Infantes and Valverdes. It is a new breed, but the old man is still there, bridging the gaps, vouching for them.

Leyland is the bridge between Sparky's Time, when the manager was king, the guy who made the players cower, who put his feet up on the desk in his office postgame, shirtless eating a cold piece of chicken and talked baseball, and today, when even in-season interviews take place at a podium with corporate logos in the backdrop. Today, baseball is a general manager's game, and GMs like Dave Dombrowski and the rest of them, the Theos and the Daniels and of course, the Billy Beanes with their stats and computers and indirect (sometimes direct) disdain for Leyland's position, are now the face of the front office, the ones who in extreme cases not only acquire the players but control the lineup as well -- but he's still there.

After a tension-filled Game 3 of the American League Championship Series where the Tigers withstood a final, unsuccessful charge from a lifeless Yankees team to reach the brink of a pennant, catcher Alex Avila said, "When you look at this team, you know who the manager is. There's no question about that."

When delirium neared, and the Tigers finished the job with an 8-1 win and the American League pennant, it was Leyland who remained the bridge, or better said, the reminder that it remains possible to be a hardhat, a grinder, a worker, who can still win in 2012 America. Leyland knows them. When the staging was complete and he held the AL championship trophy above his head after sweeping the Yankees, he spoke to them, thanking "the 3-million-plus fans who never lost the faith" and "all the people who never get any credit" and finally saying with grandfatherly concern, "and everyone, don't drink and drive, including me. Including me." Leyland is not Joe Girardi, his nervous and shaky dugout counterpart during the ALCS, who as a player made the All-Star team and played in the World Series and never managed in the minor leagues yet was handed baseball's greatest jewel of a franchise and the $200 million payroll that comes with managing the Yankees. Leyland arrived here, at the top, in the home clubhouse with plastic covering the lockers, a magnum of champagne in hand telling his boys they could take the next day off, the hard way, by managing 10 years in the Tigers' minor league system before he even got his first big league coaching job, by never making it to the majors as a player, not even for one sunny afternoon. Jim Leyland went from high school to a life in baseball and never even played a game in Triple-A. He represents the unglamorous who nevertheless claimed a piece of the American Dream.

The Tigers are in the World Series for the second time since 2006, and it's easy to accept the notion that 67-year-old James Richard Leyland, the lifelong baseball man from Perrysburg, Ohio, just close enough to Detroit to speak its language, who was born the day before the Battle of the Bulge commenced in 1944, where Warren Spahn was fighting for America instead of pitching for the Boston Braves, is the natural and obvious fit for this team and this battered and durable city, because it creates a cozy little narrative. While it is true that Leyland is the link that connects so many of the dots, it's also true that victory, and not nature, is what has made the Leyland story possible, and without that victory, he would have represented only the bridge to nowhere.

In today's impatient talk-radio culture, even in the final days of the ALCS when the Tigers ultimately buried the panicked and dramatic Yankees, Leyland was hardly secure, hardly Their Guy. The Tigers are in the World Series, but produced just the seventh-best record in an American League of 14 teams. He was hammered throughout the season for his lineup choices. The airwaves and box seats seem not to have forgiven him for the Tigers wading through so much of the regular season apparently content to look up at the Chicago White Sox, especially after following up a 95-win season and the addition of Prince Fielder with a nine-year, $214 million contract by not taking over first place until Sept. 25.

"I had people [questioning us] the whole year, but 16 games is almost 10 percent of the schedule, so that's a lot of games left," Leyland said after the sweep. "And I just reminded everybody when we took our punches all year, 'You know what? Let's just wait 'til the end, and if we've underachieved, I will be the first one to admit it. But let's play out the schedule to see if we underachieve.'

"So, hopefully, we've quieted some doubters now," he said.

When his closer, Jose Valverde, gave up two home runs in the bottom of the ninth in Game 1 to turn a 4-0 lead into a 4-4 extra-innings game, Leyland was the target for again leaving his pitcher in too long and hardly seemed like a candidate for the folksy, blue-collar moment that would define the ALCS, or at least his rejuvenated part of it. While Girardi and the Yankees melted under the heat of elimination before Game 4, Leyland took his car into the shop because his engine light was on. He walked into a diner and the fans bought him breakfast while he waited to get an oil change. He didn't care for the sausage, but the fans around him bathed in his presence, snapping photos of the manager before Leyland left, walking nearly a mile back to his mechanic, chest burning from a half-century of smoking.