The readers write, and in the last week they sent unsolicited comments about one of this site’s least favorite baseball people:
#1—“You must have enjoyed Bobby Valentine’s latest rantings.
“Does he actually think anyone believes anything he says? That ridiculous story he told yesterday about Derek Jeter’s ‘flip play’ being a mistake would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad. What I wonder is why the baseball reporters (non-Red Sox ones, that is) let him off so easily. I could have imagined a ‘real’ reporter asking him at the press briefing yesterday:
“Reporter: ‘Bobby, more than 10 years has passed since Derek Jeter made the flip play. Why now — and not when you were an ESPN baseball analyst, for instance — are you suddenly bringing this up? And are you aware that no one in baseball seems to agree with you?’
“I know Bobby is a good quote and his demeanor tends to intimidate many reporters — especially those who depend upon ‘access’ for their livelihood — but seriously?
“And, even though I’m not particularly an A-Rod fan, that crack he made yesterday about Varitek ‘beating up Alex’ was bottom-feeding, even for someone as low as Bobby. Once, I’d like to see someone tell him to just shut his mouth or they’d shut it for him. For instance, I would love to see Bobby get Joe Girardi angry. I know Bobby fancies himself not only as the smartest guy on the planet but also a physical fitness freak. But if Girardi could get mad enough to get past his religious beliefs that prevent him from fisticuffs, I’m quite confident Girardi would kick Bobby’s butt from one end of the dugout to the other….and not a lot of people would intervene.”
#2—“If you scan the Boston sports coverage of Sox spring training, it’s already all about Bobby. He makes LaRussa look shy and withdrawn.”
#3—“I’ll be looking for which sports writers curry favor w/ BV. I think you’ve said that’s his pattern, picking favorites among the writers.”
Spring training hadn’t reached March, and Valentine was being Valentine, unnecessarily and foolishly raising issues about the Yankees, Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez.
The Red Sox needed this? Well, they asked for it and should have expected it when they hired Valentine to manage their team. When they hired him, some people asked if Valentine could change. After all, he had been absent from a major league dugout for a decade, and maybe he would return a different man.
So much for fantasy.
This is not something the Red Sox needed. They had enough excess baggage carried over from last season they had to deal with, and they hired Valentine to clean up the mess the players left when they went home last Fall. They didn’t need the new manager to exacerbate their chances for recovery.
But Larry Lucchino ignored the opinion he solicited from a certain writer when he was seeking a new manager, and what’s the saying? You made your bed; now lie in it. Or how about this one: You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
To Valentine’s credit, on the other hand, the Red Sox have not lost a game under his command. If there’s anyone, though, who could figure out how to do that before the beginning of the season, it’s Valentine.
Watching Valentine’s act – again – I continue to wonder why the Red Sox wanted to subject themselves to him. They hired him after they besmirched a good man and a good manager in Terry Francona. He led them to two World Series triumphs in a four-year span, but they swept him out the door after he oversaw a monumental September collapse that left them out of the playoffs for the second successive season.
They didn’t just swat Francona in the butt with the broom, though. They unfairly maligned him, leaking accusations about his having been distracted by prescription pills that he took and suggesting that he had lost control of the players, some of whom drank beer and ate fried chicken in the clubhouse during games.
The beer-and-chicken element of the collapse was certain to hang over the team when players reported for spring training, and it was, of course, the first thing reporters asked about and the first subject Valentine was confronted with.
“Somebody was trying to save their own ass, and it probably cost a lot of people their asses,” Josh Beckett said in a Web site interview. “The snitching, it’s not good.”
Beckett was one of the pitchers named in the beer-and-chicken fest, and he acknowledged his participation.
“I’m upset at myself for the lapses in judgment,” he told reporters. “But there’s also some ill feelings toward some people.”
He didn’t identify those people, but he said, “There’s two things with the clubhouse thing that I have a problem with: If I’m going to say something about the clubhouse, my name is going to be on it. The second thing is you never want to be remembered as that guy because that will follow wherever you go. It’s just mind-boggling to me.”
I could be wrong on this, but based on my many years of being in clubhouses, I suspect that the Boston Globe learned about the beer and chicken from clubhouse attendants, not players.
Nevertheless, one result of the episode was the banning of alcohol in the clubhouse. Valentine apparently didn’t say anything about fried chicken. But maybe he figured he didn’t have to because he felt that without beer to wash it down, fried chicken would not be on the players’ in-game menu.
Asked by reporters at the start of spring training if he would include the clubhouse flap in his address to the players, Valentine said he wasn’t sure.
“Maybe as the group gets smaller and that seems like a situation that’s festering,” he said, “and if it hasn’t come to a head by the time March whatever comes around. I don’t know.”
The new manager also said he wasn’t sure if the issue created the potential for an ongoing problem. “Teams are built on trust, right?” he said. “And teamwork. Those are probably the two most important things championship teams have, so if there is distrust I think it eventually would have to be addressed. In my experience, those things usually present themselves.”
But there would soon be other issues created by Valentine himself, and they were the ones that prompted the e-mail comments from readers.
On a spring training day on which Valentine had his infielders working on relays, he was asked about the famous backhand flip Derek Jeter made in the 2001 playoff series to get Jeremy Giambi at the plate and prevent Oakland from beating the Yankees.
Valentine, asked about the play, said he thought Jeter got the ball because he was out of position, that nobody has the shortstop along the first base line on a hit to right field and no one practices that play.
It wasn’t a question of where Jeter was and where he should have been but why did Valentine make the comments he did. A person who knows him well and thus knows how and why he operates said Valentine surely had an ulterior motive for saying what he said, though he didn’t know what it was.
Jeter scoffed at Valentine’s comments, saying, “Who cares? I mean, why are we talking about this, really? He must be bored over there, huh? I don’t understand.”
The next day Valentine rescinded his remarks, admitting that one of his coaches, Gary Tuck, who had worked for the Yankees, told him the Yankees indeed had routinely practiced the play that Jeter executed.
“Total mistake on my part that they don’t practice it, that’s for sure,” Valentine told reporters in Fort Myers, Fla.
Valentine, however, did not retract his unsolicited comment about Rodriguez. Praising Jason Varitek before he announced his retirement, Valentine recalled how the catcher “beat up” Rodriguez during a game between the Yankees and the Red Sox in 2004.
The beating actually consisted of Varitek sticking his glove in Rodriguez’s face as he defended the Boston pitcher, Bronson Arroyo, who had hit the third baseman with a pitch. Rodriguez wisely declined to escalate Valentine’s exaggerated claim into a verbal clash.
“I’m not going to win many battles here when it comes to words, especially against Bobby,” he told reporters.
The best way to win a war of words with Valentine is to let him talk. Eventually he will implant one or both of his feet firmly in his big mouth.
Valentine, however, had company in the Red Sox foot-in-mouth epidemic. In fact, he was in good company. His No. 1 boss, John Henry, the principal owner, had to clean up a mess he created in the off-season when he went on a radio show and said that signing left fielder Carl Crawford to a $142 million contract a year earlier wasn’t his idea.
Henry was speaking in the aftermath of the team’s collapse and Crawford’s terrible season (.255). But Henry realized he had been wrong and met with Crawford at the start of spring training and apologized to him.
Before the Red Sox get too far into the season, the betting is Valentine will have to have one or two of those sessions.
BURNETT A BEAUTY
It’s usually the other way around, but A.J. Burnett has experienced what it is like to have injury added to insult.
First came the insult: The always contending Yankees traded their $82.5 million pitcher to the never contending Pittsburgh Pirates.
Then came the injury: Batting after a six-year hiatus in the American League, Burnett fouled a bunt off his face and fractured his orbital bone. He had surgery and is not expected to be ready to pitch for the Pirates for two to three months.
The Pirates, who have had a major league record 19 consecutive losing seasons, thought so little of their incumbent starting pitchers, that they had planned to have the 35-year-old right-hander be their opening-day starter.
Burnett was looking forward to that assignment as well as just being back in the National League, where he pitched for the Florida Marlins for the first seven years of his career.
“It’s going to be fun,” he said after the trade. “I’m going back to the National League, where I can hit and bunt and get the joy back into the game.”
Burnett isn’t expected to derive too much joy from his bunt trick.
The Yankees didn’t derive any joy from his pitching. In three seasons with them, he had a 34-35 record and a 4.79 earned run average. His e.r.a. was over 5 each of the last two seasons.
Burnett is owed $33 million for the last two years of his contract, but the Yankees will pay $20 million of that amount.
In New York, he was best known for delivering facial shaving cream or whipped cream pies to teammates who had game-winning hits. He was also the first winner in 2010 of the award I created — the Sigh Young award for the majors’ worst pitcher. Now he can become the first pitcher to win the award in both leagues.
DRIVING CROSSTOWN FROM L.A. TO ANAHEIM
As poorly as Frank McCourt has run the Los Angeles Dodgers, of all the things he has done wrong that have put him in position to have to sell his team, one thing stands out in my mind. That is McCourt’s refusal to challenge the blatant way Arte Moreno, the Angels’ owner, hijacked his team’s name.
Moreno renamed his team the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim as if the Angels played in Los Angeles. McCourt uttered not a peep in protest. “I have other fights more important than that,” McCourt told me when I asked about the hijacking.
Whatever fights those were didn’t materialize, and Moreno and the Angels profited from their new appropriated name.
I have to believe that if McCourt had just registered a complaint with Major League Baseball, Commissioner Bud Selig would have had to tell Moreno the name Los Angeles was already taken by a team that actually plays in Los Angeles, not in some other city, not in some other county.
McCourt, however, made no complaint, and Selig has demonstrated he won’t act until and unless someone complains.
On the other hand, I have to give Moreno credit. He not only has succeeded with his marketing scheme, but he has also converted the way Los Angelinos think about the Angels and their home.
One day last week this was the first paragraph in an article written by Tony Jackson, who covers the Dodgers for ESPNLosAngeles.com:
“GLENDALE, Ariz. — Los Angeles Dodgers manager Don Mattingly, who spent his entire 14-year career as a major league player with the New York Yankees, said Tuesday that despite the major offseason moves and high expectations of the crosstown Los Angeles Angels, the Dodgers still own the Southland.”
Crosstown? The Angels are crosstown from the Dodgers? When did that happen? The Angels have moved in geographically, not just metaphorically? Did they do it in the middle of the night the way the N.F.L.’s Colts left Baltimore for Indianapolis?
The Cubs (North Side) and the White Sox (South Side) are crosstown. The Yankees (Bronx) and the Mets (Queens) are crosstown. The Giants-Athletics and the Orioles-Nationals are more crosstown than the Dodgers and the Angels.
ONLY 20 WILD CARDS TO GO
If anybody would like to research this, I’d be happy to get the results. I just don’t have time to do it right now. But I feel certain that Commissioner Bud Selig assured fans in the early years of the wild card that baseball would not increase the number of wild-card teams in the playoffs. Two it was, and two it would remain.
Now there are four. Do I hear eight?
“This change increases the rewards of a division championship and allows two additional markets to experience playoff baseball each year,” Commissioner Bud Selig said in a statement.
On which a readers wrote, “Why not let every team in both leagues compete in the playoffs? Then every team would have ‘additional markets’ and more money would flow into every owner’s pockets. Sounds good to me.”
I can’t wait until a third-place team (Red Sox last season, for example) wins a wild-card spot and goes on to win the World Series. A team as hot as the Red Sox were cold last September could do it.