From Mr. and Mrs. Met to Sidd Finch, from Keith Hernandez and the entire 1986 World Series roster to a Latin pop star called “Candelita” and a slugger called the “Polar Bear,” the Mets have had quite a few characters come through Queens.
Bobby Valentine may be the biggest one of them all.
Best known as the manager who once donned a disguise to return to the dugout after an ejection, the charismatic former utility player and former Mets skipper was inducted into the club’s Hall of Fame on Saturday at Citi Field, along with Lee Mazzilli, a member of the 1986 World Series team. Typically, press conferences for these types of ceremonies skew towards nostalgia, but Valentine turned his into a comedy act.
Technically, it was his second act, since he crashed manager Carlos Mendoza’s press conference for his first act. When Bobby V. wants to talk, he will.
Valentine teased Mazzilli about once being the swoonworthy target of female affection in his playing days, talked about being covered in shaving cream on train station advertisements, compared his role as a manager to that of God, and took a shot at David Stearns, the club’s president of baseball operations.
“You pitch, you win. You don’t pitch, you don’t win,” Mazzilli said when asked if he thought the current iteration of the Mets has a chance to turn around their season.
Valentine interjected: “Sounds like run prevention to me.”
It was as entertaining as it was refreshing. Baseball is a sport prone to quirky characters, but over the last 10-15 years, it’s felt as though the media mechanism has steamrolled right over that part of the game. Media training has beaten these players and coaches into submission. They’re trained to say the same things over and over again.
“We just have to keep working hard.”
“Just trying to control what I can control.”
Even Crash Davis would be bored.
The game is now run by people without people skills. The Ivy League-educated general managers mostly look the same, dress the same and sound the same. Corporate America has infiltrated America’s Pastime, with CEOs and PR flacks trying to shape team images into ones more befitting of a bank.
The game wouldn’t know what to do with someone like Valentine anymore, which is a shame since baseball needs more people like him. How many managers could develop followings halfway around the world as Valentine did in Japan? How many managers would even think to wear sunglasses and smear eye black under their nose to make a mustache?
How many would load supplies into trucks for victims of a mass tragedy, and would rally their teams to do the same? Valentine showed true leadership after the 9/11 terrorist attacks by spearheading the Mets’ efforts to get supplies to first responders. When Shea Stadium was used as a storage ground for supplies, Valentine was out there driving the forklifts. He visited firehouses — something the Mets still do every year on 9/11 — and he was in the community without cameras.
He didn’t do it for attention; he did it because it felt like the right thing to do.
But don’t worry, Valentine got plenty of attention during his managerial tenure in New York. It’s the world’s biggest baseball stage and he was a face of it (without a mustache, of course).
There might be a cult of personality when it comes to Valentine and his fans, but it works with the Mets. They aren’t the ultra-serious Yankees, and they can’t be. The Mets have to embrace the weirdness. Somehow, the times are always turbulent, as if chaotic forces are working against them. Was that elbow injury actually from a fastball, or was it more evidence that God hates the Mets?
Valentine knew how to embrace the chaos, probably because some of it was self-inflicted. Look, he took it too far with the disguise, and he took it way too far when he lambasted his GM, Steve Phillips, in the infamous “Whartongate” incident. His feuds with the media were unnecessary at best, and detrimental at worst. Maybe the excessive cliches we see now are, in part, a reaction to managers like Valentine.
Like all of us, he just wanted to be understood.
“I tried to share things that probably shouldn’t have been shared most of the time to get people understanding just how crazy it was what we were trying to do,” Valentine said.
But the energetic, enigmatic Valentine was successful because he was himself. And he still is himself.
Valentine will forever be remembered for his big personality as much as he will be remembered for 536 wins, the 2000 National League pennant, and for how he showed up for his community when it mattered most.
“I want to be remembered as the guy who shared, the guy who tried to understand his players and give everything I have to them,” he said. “And then I wanted to have the people who were paying tickets to come to the show kind of appreciate the product.”
