IT seems too hard sometimes, being Bobby Valentine.
There are three sides to every story: yours, mine and the truth. And somewhere in the middle, uncannily, incessantly, is Valentine. He wasn’t the first manager to have to tell a fading veteran unwilling to accept his own mortality that he is not an everyday player any more. But rarely has a guy like Darryl Hamilton, who walked into the manager’s office saying he wanted more starts, end up asking out of one that very night.
Valentine also was not the only manager ever to win a pennant and be saddled with the thankless task of filling out an All-Star squad. But assuredly, he has become the first to be accused of deliberately misleading a candidate that he was going to make the team.
“I know how much of a jerk I am,” said Valentine last night after another dismal loss, in the midst of another dismal he-said, he-said. “I would not do anything to cause this to happen.”
“The truth is, when I talked to him on the phone, he said I was on the team barring something crazy happening,” Cliff Floyd told Sporting News Radio yesterday. “Now I’m going to ask you, what crazy thing could happen in one day?”
Floyd would be surprised if he were on the Mets, not that he would ever want to play for the “stupidest” manager in the game, something he called Valentine after getting drilled with a pitch during a tense Shea series.
The Marlin star said he wouldn’t go to Seattle to play for Valentine. The manager sought confirmation, endeavoring through third parties to reach Seth Levinson, Floyd’s agent. When Valentine received no response, he called Floyd, telling him he was “right there on the bubble.”
Unless he wanted to set Floyd up, that call was much more than was required of Valentine. Of course, having gone to the trouble of making it, Valentine could have gone ahead and left Phil Nevin, who had two fewer home runs and four fewer RBIs than Floyd, off the team in favor of the Marlin outfielder. The Padres already had a representative in Ryan Klesko, giving Valentine an opportunity to make himself look magnanimous and Floyd the bad guy if he refused to show up.
“I had a better chance of winning with [Nevin],” Valentine said. “They told me Joe [Torre] was taking two lefthanded pitchers, I had two lefthanded first basemen. It got down to trying to win the game.”
But Valentine couldn’t win in the long run. The high road turned into a dirt road after Floyd spent $16,000 on airline tickets to fly family and friends to Seattle.
Curiously, upon first learning he didn’t make the team, Floyd told ESPN he was cool with Valentine’s call, never mentioning he felt misled by it.
It was only after hearing Valentine had said there were other players more worthy of selection that Floyd brandished the airline receipts.
“I know what I said,” Valentine said. “I don’t think [he could have misunderstood]. I didn’t even tell Rick Reed he made the team until the announcement.”
Could it been a case of Floyd hearing what he wanted to hear?
“Possibly,” Valentine said. “But I know the last thing that I said was that there were 24 hours or however many hours before [the selection] and just sit tight.
“Only the guilty are guilty. I know exactly what I meant and so does he. Yesterday, he was OK, then things changed. Shame on someone.”
We wonder what Valentine’s motivation would be in deliberately setting up Floyd. We also wonder why baseball puts managers in the position to be accused of allowing grudges and favoritism to be factors in All-Star selections, instead of giving those decisions to more neutral parties.
And, as always, we wonder why Valentine, rightly or wrongly but continually accused of being full of it, unquestionably often seems to be into it up to his chest.
