A valentine for Valentine

Say what you will about Bobby V., at least he cared

My most enduring image of Bobby Valentine: He's stepping out into a steady drizzle and onto the Shea Stadium field late on the evening of Oct. 17, 1999. The Mets had just beaten the Braves, 4-3, in a 15-inning National League Championship Series game in which neither the rain, nor Valentine's machinations, ever let up. He used 23 players that night, he made all the right moves with his bullpen. And he played it smart enough to keep Matt Franco, his best pinch-hitter for the 15th when Valentine himself, and all of Mets Nation, needed Franco most.

And after Robin Ventura hit a ball over the wall to complete the comeback victory (the Mets had trailed 3-1 when they came to bat), Valentine bustled out of the dugout and turned to face what was left of a sold-out crowd. He swiveled and pointed to the survivors in each section and said, repeatedly, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."

It was pure Valentine for so many reasons: Because it was corny. Because it was true. Because it was a moment of pure emotion. Because it brought him into the spotlight he adores.

Because, as that toothy grin broke through his weary creases and his eyebrows went up, you could see how spent he was, and how hard he'd worked for so long -- not just that night or that season but for his whole baseball life -- for a moment like this. Because he never forgets, even in his most earnest, self-involved moments, that baseball is for the fans. And because he really believed, as he pointed to the crowd, that the Mets could not have won the game without them.

The underdog Mets pushed the Braves hard before losing that series. The next year, under Valentine, they would go to the World Series. Valentine's two-year playoff run was sustained by stars like Mike Piazza and Al Leiter, but the Mets succeeded because no-name guys whom Valentine believed in hit game-winning homers and scored game-winning runs. Guys like journeyman Todd Pratt and unknown Melvin Mora. Or the round Hawaiian, Benny Agbayani, who would not have had a major league career if not for Valentine's support. Valentine went to the Series with guys like Timo Perez.

Those are the players Bobby coaches best. The guys who take his emotion and feed off it. Players who use him. Valentine wins by strategy -- he out-managed his National League peers in the playoffs -- and by inspiring his players to believe they can do something special. You give retread Shawon Dunston key at-bats in the early flank of the 1999 season and, what do you know, he goes on to win a playoff game for you four months later.

It was time for Valentine to go, of course. You don't survive after you lose 12 straight, finish last in the division and end up on the butt-end of a city's worth of bong-hits-in-the-bullpen/doobies-in-the-dugout jokes. It was a disappointing year, and there were others -- like the late-season, penant-scotching collapse of 1998. But there was also the NL Championship Series in 1999, the World Series in 2000 and the valiant September run the Mets staged beneath their NYPD caps last year, after the buildings had fallen and New York needed all the inspiration it could get.

For all the Mets fans who consider Valentine's tenure a failure I have six words: Buddy Harrelson, Frank Bamberger, Jeff Torborg. (Did I mention Buddy Harrelson?)

Valentine once wore a fake moustache in the dugout, disguising himself after an ejection, and that splendid joke wasn't his only misdirection. He swaggered and primped and behaved as if he knew baseball better than a genetically engineered offspring of Alexander Cartwright and Abner Doubleday. He contradicted himself to save his tuchus. He took credit even when it wasn't due. Worst, he didn't hold his players accountable for playing sound baseball. When he had a team anchored by fundamentally sound players like John Olerud and Robin Ventura, Valentine could manage them and know that his fielders would throw the ball to the right place and his batters would get runners over. With this year's bunch of navel-gazers (Robby Alomar, Mo Vaughn, etc.) things went amok. The Mets never ran the bases intelligently, never hit the cutoff men, never had smart at-bats when they needed them. The failures made an already bad season unbearable to watch, and Valentine didn't have the wherewithal to straighten his guys out.

Yes, he thought he knew everything about baseball when he only knows a lot. There are worse crimes. After all, he was polite enough to endure talk show hosts who thought THEY knew more than he did. Because even if he was pompous, this much is true: If you came a way from a baseball conversation with Bobby Valentine and didn't learn something, you weren't paying attention.

You never heard him angrier than early this season when people suggested he wanted to be fired. Charge him with anything, but not with being passionless. He cared. He came in early, he stayed late and we watched him go grayer by the month. And Valentine always remembered how lucky he was to manage in this great city. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, no New York sports figure rose higher. He gave hours and hours of his time and he gave half a million dollars of his money. That's vintage Valentine, stepping out under threatening skies and reaching out to people. Call it his way of saying "Thank you."

Sports Illustrated senior writer Kostya Kennedy takes sides every Wednesday at CNNSI.com.

 

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