Valentine gets his turn at the plate
Back in May, I took my swings shortly after Valentine joined the lineup of candidates in Stamford’s mayoral race. I wrote a column revisiting his Major League Baseball days along with his 11-month tenure as Stamford’s director of public safety, health and welfare a decade ago, which he did for a token $10,000 he donated to charity.
I’m not the only person who revived the weekend Valentine flew to Texas for his far more lucrative side gig as part of ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” crew while his team in Stamford dealt with Hurricane Irene.
Valentine admits “the one thing that just drives me crazy is that safety director” story.
Among Valentine’s strengths is that he’s always been able to pivot on defense as well as offense. How may baseball players can fill in as catcher when called upon, as Valentine did in his final season as a player with the Seattle Mariners (he played every position but pitcher in the majors)? And I know he can handle some high hard ones and outside curves from journalists. But he repeated, in a meeting with the Hearst Connecticut Media editorial board in August, that the Hurricane narrative “bugs me.”
As I learned early in my career from journalism hall of famer Jim Dwyer, whenever you put someone in a hole, it’s fair play to offer them a shovel to dig out. Valentine rubs some proverbial pine tar on the handle and starts digging.
He worked seven days a week in 2011, he explains, and his lineup in Stamford was prepped to handle the crisis in his absence.
“If I’m not there, it’s taken care of because that’s what a good leader does.”
As he speaks, Valentine, 71, summons the charisma he has successfully branded into multiple restaurants and punches key words in a manner honed from days in the broadcast booth.
Another point Valentine says is getting overlooked is his work over the last eight years as athletic director of Sacred Heart University. He oversaw 34 sports, a thousand athletes, and a hundred coaches and staff, “yet that seems to always be left out of articles ... as though that part of my life hasn’t even existed.”
He’s clearly proud of his stint at the college in Fairfield, underscoring initiatives to advance women’s sports by introducing a rugby team and hosting the first Division I women’s wrestling team in New England.
After he entered the mayor’s race, Valentine took a leave of absence from the position. Earlier this month, Sacred Heart appointed Judy Ann Riccio as athletic director, the first women to hold the position at the school.
In August, we talked about Valentine’ priorities: improving morale among personnel, addressing the crumbling infrastructure of the public schools, promoting small business and affordable housing and reimagining use of Stamford’s waterfront and Old Town Hall.
Since I fired some brushback pitches about Valentine’s dramatic life in the spring, I’ll offer some summer home-run derby lobs as well. Though he stresses
his family’s century in Stamford, there is considerable value in the time Valentine spent away from his hometown. During his playing and managing career, he’s lived in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Tokyo, as well as other parts of the United States. Among other things, it allows him to empathize with residents coping with language barriers.
A diverse city such as Stamford, “needs somebody who has had diverse experiences,” he suggests.
He is Bobby Valentine, so he can’t help but summon his own baseball cliches while striving to sound mayoral. “We’ve kind of swung and missed on the idea of owning and living in Stamford,” he says.
Stamford was recently documented as the second most-populated city in Connecticut, but
Valentine envisions luring more owners and fewer renters. “You have to incentivize builders to build what is needed, not the thing that gives them the highest return on their investment,” he says.
Having lived in several neighborhoods in Stamford, he also wants the city to “flow better.” The Downtown Special Services District is “spectacular,” he says, but “some of the surrounding communities feel like they’ve been left out.”
With Mayor David Martin out of the race after soundly losing to Caroline Simmons in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, Stamford is left with two candidates who lack Martin’s experience with managing a $600 million-plus city budget.
Valentine, who is running unaffiliated, characterizes his management approach as strategic, rather than to micro-manage. “I was never the best cook ...,” he says. “I hired great people to do that, and that’s why I survived it 38 years in the same location and 25 years in other locations.”
He added, “And I expect to do that in the city also. I’ll surround myself by people who are very good at doing specific jobs that need to get done.”
I never doubted Valentine would dig back in at the plate in the face of criticism. He’s heard it all from journalists, and in different languages. “I’ve been in New York City and Tokyo with eight sports newspapers a day watching every move I ever made,” he explains.
As the campaign reaches its final innings, one thing Valentine can count on is that the people of his hometown will tell him what they think, either in person or at the polls.
“If I’m not there, it’s taken care of because that’s what a good leader does.”
Bobby Valentine