David Plouffe helped craft Barack Obama’s strategy that took advantage of how the Democratic Party apportions delegates.

Baseball and politics are two of David Plouffe’s passions. So it was natural that his love for one game reinforced something that proved crucial in the other: Singles can score runs.

As Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign manager, Plouffe was the mastermind behind a winning strategy that looked well past Super Tuesday’s contests on Feb. 5 and placed value on both large and small states.

The campaign had the money to make such a potentially low-yield wager, and Plouffe had long understood that the Democratic Party’s complex system for apportioning convention delegates meant winning even one congressional district in a state could help generate the total needed to reach the magic number.

From his 11th-floor Michigan Avenue office, he sent resources to states like Nebraska, Idaho and North Dakota that Sen. Hillary Clinton virtually ignored, putting extra emphasis on those with lower-turnout caucuses instead of primaries.

The plan, which had been in his head at least as far back as late 2006, was partly out of necessity because Clinton’s early name recognition and party ties provided her with advantages in big states.

The strategy proved itself in the two weeks following Feb. 5, as Obama won 11 contests in a row and achieved a delegate lead he would never lose. In late February, Plouffe reportedly confided to a colleague that he believed a mathematical tipping point had been reached.

Marking one of the biggest upsets in U.S. political history, Obama himself saluted his behind-the-scenes general at the start of his victory speech last week in St. Paul.

“Thank you to our campaign manager David Plouffe, who never gets any credit, but who has built the best political organization in the country,” he said.

As Obama’s campaign transitions to the general election, Plouffe (pronounced Pluff) will lead the way. Ironically, it will be against someone he listed in 2003 in a Washington political journal as his favorite Republican, Sen. John McCain.

Plouffe, 41, is business partners with Chicago-based media strategist David Axelrod and worked with him on Obama’s winning 2004 U.S. Senate campaign. But Plouffe, unlike Axelrod, rarely appears in front of television cameras.

“He’s the most disciplined and focused person I have ever met in politics,” said Democratic strategist Steve Elmendorf, who previously supported Clinton. “It is very easy to get distracted by the press and donors and activists. David just has a great filter and he doesn’t let any of the noise bother him. In a presidential campaign, that’s a rare talent.”

Plouffe, who declined to be interviewed for this story, believes that the airing of campaign disputes in public should be avoided at all cost and that the candidate should always be the focus. Even with a rapidly growing staff of about 800, unintentional leaks are rare.

“He is smart and scrappy and doesn’t bring a huge amount of ego to the table,” said JoDee Winterhof, a political strategist who has worked with and competed against him at several points of his career.

A specialist in tactics, Plouffe also understands the workings of the media and has offered lines for Obama speeches that were powerful enough to make the final cut, a skill he honed working on many different campaigns and with Axelrod.

In politics since college, Plouffe worked with Axelrod on the successful 2006 campaign of Deval Patrick for Massachusetts governor. An earlier big win came in 1996, when he managed the campaign for Bob Torricelli to fill Bill Bradley’s U.S. Senate seat.

After his work at the DCCC, Plouffe joined Axelrod’s consulting business in the winter of 2000.

“He has the capacity to handle more details in his head at one time than anyone I know,” Axelrod said. “David is very determined at whatever he does.”