Whose Valentine Will Bobby Be?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Yesterday, former Mets manager and current skipper of the Japanese champion Chiba Lotte Marines, Bobby Valentine, went out of his way to disabuse anyone of the idea that he was under contract to any team for next season.
“I haven’t been offered a contract to manage anywhere next year,” he told the Associated Press, adding, “I want to be challenged, I want to be appreciated, and I want to be comfortable in my surroundings.”
This is good news for Major League Baseball, which needs more managers like Valentine. The bad news is that he ever had to go to Japan in the first place. With due respect to Willie Randolph, of whom I think more than anyone who reads this paper (at least judging by my e-mail), Valentine should have been managing in Shea Stadium all this time. The idiotic choice to fire Valentine in deference to blow-dried mannequin Steve Phillips following the 2001 season is a mistake from which the Mets only really began to recover this past year.
Looking around the majors, there aren’t many teams that couldn’t use a man of Valentine’s skills. In Texas, where he managed the Rangers from 1985-92, and Flushing, where he led the Mets from 1996-2002, he got teams with .400 talent to play .520 baseball, and in 2000, he took a team with .520 talent to the World Series.
It’s fortuitous, though, that the two jobs to which he’s been linked recently and the only two presently open) are with the Dodgers and Devil Rays; outside of the Cubs, no teams could get more out of Valentine than these two.
The Valentine style is mainly characterized by his loyalty to the team, by which I mean he places winning above everything else. That’s a lot rarer than you’d think. Valentine will play kids over veterans, veterans over kids, and no-names over both. He’ll ingratiate or alienate the press. He’ll insist on literal interpretations of various rules.
Much of this drives people crazy, be cause it’s just not how things are done in baseball; it violates the game’s versions of gentlemen’s agreements you find in any profession. Valentine is more concerned with seeking advantages for his team than maintaining good will with his rivals, the press, or his players; that’s one big reason why he wins.
The other main reason is his talent for spotting and developing talent. In Texas, he groomed an unbelievable set of young players: Kevin Brown, Ivan Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez, Dean Palmer, Sammy Sosa, Bobby Witt, Ruben Sierra, and Kenny Rogers, among others.
He managed Rafael Palmeiro as he transitioned from a slap-hitter to an annual 40-homer man, and stuck with Jamie Moyer years before the left-hander developed into the great change-up artist of his era.
With the Mets, Valentine pulled John Olerud, Armando Benitez, Glendon Rusch, and Rick Reed off the scrap heap and helped give them a chance to become stars. He helped break Octavio Dotel into the majors and was the only person in the world who thought Melvin Mora could be one of the best players in the game.
Most speculation has Valentine landing in L.A. with the the Dodgers, which makes sense. Valentine has a long history with the franchise, dating back to his days as a top prospect in the 1960s.
Tommy Lasorda is in power in Los Angeles right now, and the team has both underachieving veterans of the sort Valentine has done so much with in the past and a farm system that ranks among the very best in the game. It’s a glamour franchise for a man with the personality for the big stage, and in every way seems the ideal fit.
Still, I’d prefer to see Valentine take over the Devil Rays. The Dodgers have an excellent farm system, but Tampa Bay has a collection of young talent to rival that of those late-’80s/early-’90s Rangers teams, which is something very different. A manager who could truly mold Delmon Young, Carl Crawford, Scott Kazmir, and company into a team playing a certain brand of baseball could have a monster on his hands. The perfect manager for this bunch would be either Leo Durocher or Billy Martin, and Valentine’s as close as anyone’s going to come today to their style of managing.
The best part of this is that under Valentine, the Rays could actually overtake the Yankees and Red Sox. The honest fan of either team will admit that this would, in the long run, be as good for baseball as pretty much anything could be.
I don’t expect Valentine to go to Tampa Bay; if he returns to America, it seems likely he’ll do so as the dominant figure in the Los Angeles organization, serving, as Tony LaRussa does in St. Louis, as a manager in the old style. This would be good for the game, too; the Dodgers have been needlessly crippled for nearly 20 years, and should assume their rightful place alongside the Cardinals and Yankees as one of the game’s strongest franchises.
But whatever the case, here’s hoping the Dodgers and Devil Rays get to making those offers quickly. Enough with the milquetoast likes of Jim Tracy and the blowhard likes of Lou Piniella; bring back BobbyV.