Kids, don't start smoking. At least not now. Wait until you're an old baseball manager. Then it will confer instant credibility and create a colorful lead image for profiles of you. Just ask Tigers skipper Jim Leyland.

Tom Verducci's otherwise excellent, stats-laden article about Leyland in this week's Sports Illustrated begins, "Cigarette smoke coiled upward from the ashtray and, illuminated by the fluorescent lights above, hung in a thin bluish cloud around the wise, old, gray head of Jim Leyland."

His smoking has been an obsession of sorts for SI as Leyland has hopped from club to club. In a 1990 article about Leyland's success with the Pirates, the magazine noted, "Jim Leyland doesn't smoke cigarettes any more." But in a preview of the 1997 Marlins, who would go on to win an improbable championship, the magazine wrote, "He still chain-smokes, chugs black coffee and thinks constantly about his lineup."

Old, smoking managers and champion Marlins fit together snugly. Jack McKeon's cigar-smoking in 2003 was the stuff of legend. Here's Gelf buddy Albert Chen, also in SI, on the 72-year-old's habits: "Nearly an hour after the Marlins beat the Giants in Game 4 of the Division Series to advance to the NLCS, a haze of smoke lifted from a corner of the Moet & Chandon-drenched locker room at Pro Player Stadium, and the beaming, crinkled mug of the old manager emerged."

It's been three long years since a wizened skipper has emerged from a haze of smoke to lead a wild-card team to surprising success, and sportswriters are making up for lost time. Here are some sightings of Leyland from within a haze of smoke:

Globe and Mail, Toronto
Jim Leyland is a Marlboro man living in a smoke-free world, but make no mistake: he is a man for his time and it is his born-again managerial fire that has rekindled the hopes of Detroit Tigers baseball fans.

Yahoo Sports' Jeff Passan
Jim Leyland is smoking a cigarette. Wait. No. Every Jim Leyland story starts with him smoking a cigarette. Jim Leyland is not about cigarettes. He is about passion. So let's try again.
Passan, a fine baseball writer, recognizes the cliché and attempts to subvert it, though he returns to Leyland's bad habits several times (for good reason; it turns out Leyland really is passionate about his smokes).

New York Times
Throughout the postseason, Leyland has made choice after magical choice to push the Tigers. Leyland, 61, is a no-nonsense manager who wears metal cleats, speaks bluntly and smokes cigarettes in the dugout. He managed the 1997 Florida Marlins to a championship and has reached the playoffs 5 times in 15 seasons.
Somehow the cigarettes are meant to relate to the first sentence and the last sentence of this paragraph. Gelf isn't sure how.

USA Today
He still smokes as if cigarettes are an extension to his fingers and he's a junk-food junkie—his refrigerator is full of Twinkies, Hostess Cupcakes and Clark Bars. He's still a no-nonsense, no-frills, straight-shooting manager.
Apparently, cigarettes and Clark Bars aren't frills.

Inside Bay Area's Dave Del Grande
The Tigers' manager is the ideal man to match up against in a short series because of his ultra-conservative, ultra-serious approach. Tension oozes from his cigarette smoke, making it unlikely his inexperienced squad will be at its best in the spotlight.
This column, taking the opposite spin on smoking before the end of the season, didn't prove prescient. Fortunately for Del Grande's hometown team, the A's, they didn't have to face the Tigers—as Del Grande wished they would—until the ALCS. This may explain why he started a recent column like this: "OK, I've been wrong before…
"

Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette
The Tigers' manager put his feet on a desk and took a puff of a cigarette. With his team in line for a berth in the postseason, I wondered: How soon until he breaks out the victory cigar?