Most of the credit for the success that the Tigers have so far enjoyed goes to the pitching staff. And rightfully so. The players, after all, are the show. “I think we’ve got some pretty good pitchers who, knock on wood, have a done a pretty good job,” Jim Leyland said.
        However, at least a portion of that credit for the Tigers’ first-place status also has to go to Rick Knapp, the Tigers’ 47-year-old rookie pitching coach who began the season on the spot after the team had scapegoated and fired his predecessor, Chuck Hernandez.
        Night after night, after the players, other coaches, and even the manager have gone home, Knapp remains in the clubhouse, watching that day’s game all over again on video tape, breaking down the performance of the pitcher,  pitch by pitch. The next day, Knapp sits down with that hurler and goes over it again, asking questions like, “What did you think was your best pitch?” and “What did you think was your worst pitch?”
        It is a painstaking process, but one that, so far, is paying dividends.
        “He’s had to do double-duty, he’s had two jobs,” Leyland noted.
        In addition to instructing and advising the Tiger pitchers, Knapp, who spent the last 17 years working as the Minnesota Twins’ minor league pitching coordinator, is still getting acclimated to the major leagues.
        “He’s doing things up here that he didn’t have to do in the minor leagues,” Leyland explained.
        With the Tigers, Knapp, who himself never spent a day in the big leagues as a player, has had to win the confidence of proven big league winners such as Justin Verlander, Fernando Rodney, Dontrelle Willis, and Joel Zumaya.
        “I told him when we hired him, ‘Don’t come in and tell everybody how much you know,’ ” Leyland said. “I told him to ‘Just let it flow.’
        “It’s not that he doesn’t know a lot, because he does. But he didn’t try to push himself on anybody.”
        As a result, going into Thursday’s matinee against the Boston Red Sox, the Tigers, who proved in 2006 that pitching wins pennants, boasted the second-best ERA (4.00) in the American League.