SHOOTING FROM THE LIP
Nothing has gone right in Boston this season, but all the blame doesn’t belong with Bobby Valentine Mike Lupica,
Underst and something about how things have worked out for the Red Sox this season: Blaming it on Bobby Valentine would be like blaming the Mets on Terry Collins.
The two men came into this season with completely different levels of expectations. But both have done as much as they could have playing a bad hand.
This is not the way it was supposed to work out when Valentine became the manager of the Red Sox, when he was asked to come in and clean up the oil spill of last September. Somehow, though, a couple of weeks before another baseball September for the Boston Red Sox, the president and CEO, Larry Lucchino, has to go on the radio in Boston and in New York and say that Valentine will at least keep his job through the season.
That is exactly where we are with the Red Sox and with Valentine, who will eventually take the fall for everything that has gone wrong since the Red Sox were still ahead of the Yankees a year ago, right before they played the absolute worst September ever played by a team that had nearly gotten to 40 games over .500 before that.
And before we found out they were doing everything, some of them anyway, except play beer pong i n the clubhouse during games.
“I don’t know if it’s more than I expected,” Valentine said Friday at Yankee Stadium. “But it’s been challenging.”
This won’t be the first time in baseball history a manager will be fired for so many things beyond his control. It doesn’t change the fact that Valentine won’t make it to the second year of his two-year contract. There were all the predictions, from the start, that Bobby Valentine wouldn’t last in Boston. He was supposed to last longer than this. And please spare all the boneheaded analysis that he did this to himself.
Guess what? When Valentine goes, he will probably be glad to go. He will be happy to get away from some of the players who act as if last September happened on its own in Boston, get away from arrogant and entitled members of his coaching staff who sometimes have acted like they aren’t required to talk to the manager or even acknowledge his presence in the room; coaches who should have been fired months ago.
And maybe Valentine will be glad to get away from fans who have not gotten over Terry Francona being replaced as the Red Sox manager, as if the 2012 team managed itself into that ditch last September, as if it didn’t happen on Francona’s watch. If you can call it watching.
Valentine can still manage a baseball game as well as anybody you want to talk about it. He has had to make a bullpen out of practically nothing, had to make Alfredo Aceves into a closer, had to survive a season in which he has not had his top five hitters --- Jacoby Ellsbury, Carl Crawford, Dustin Pedroia, Adrian Gonzalez, David Ortiz – together for a single game.
Valentine has also watched Jon Lester and Josh Beckett, who were supposed to be the two best pitchers he had and two of the best in the American League, mostly pitch like scrubs, at least until Lester began to find himself lately, pitch the way he did Saturday at Yankee Stadium.
Here is what Lucchino said to me on Friday: “I know people in baseball think that you shouldn’t site injuries, everyone has them... well, not everyone has them to the magnitude that we had had. In fact, there is an article in USA Today today about the injuries beset in baseball in general and they point out that no one is in the category that the Red Sox are in in terms of key players; 29 players have been sent to the disabled list (29 trips to the disabled list that is).
“So, that’s a factor. The instability of the pitching staff is a factor, the transition from one organization and administration to another in terms of the general manager change has got to be a little bit of a part of it. But if you asked me to site the major reasons, I would site the aberrational number of injuries and the instability of the starting pitchers.”
More from Lucchino: “In fairness to (Valentine), he never really had that team that he thought he was going to have on the field…. There have been long stays on the disabled list, extended, unpredictable stays on the disabled list. And, I think Bobby didn’t have the horses... He lost his closer a few days before the start of the season and did a masterful job of reconstructing the bullpen. But, it was never ‘here’s this solid team, ready to go and healthy and primed to show the world that we’ve got something to prove.”
Understand something: It is not as if they are playing the way the Mets have played since their own September collapses in 2007 and 2008. This is less than 162 games from them, everything that has happened since last September 1.
This shouldn’t be Valentine’s last managing job. He hasn’t done everything right in Boston or said everything right. But at his best this season he’s been as good as he ever was with the Mets. It just turned out to be the wrong job for him. Wrong job, wrong team, wrong place, wrong time. He probably misses the Mets.