Bobby Valentine meets Red Sox Nation

Here's BOBBY~! Photo credit: Cj Gunther/European Pressphoto Agency

On Thursday it was made official: The Boston Red Sox have found their 45th manager and his name is Bobby Valentine.

Owners Larry Lucchino and John Henry helped GM Ben Cherington introduce Valentine to the always boisterous Boston media at 5:30pm earlier today and the full press conference can be found in the embedded video below.

Here were the major takeaways from today’s press conference:

• Valentine is excited to use sabermetrics and says he’s open to working with the front office.
• Wants to fit into the machine and work within the organization to make it better. Wants to create a culture of ‘excellence’.
• Said there isn’t ‘any place that’s tougher to do you job well.’
• Will be doing a lot of work with management to get a better grasp on the team to better mentally prepare for the season. Said selection process was very taxing and didn’t want to put the horse ahead of the carriage.
• Didn’t rule out the possibility of bringing old friend and teammate Bill Buckner to be a coach. He was sure to emphasize however – that he wanted the best people for the job, not just old friends. If Bill is that guy, he’d love to have him.
• Learned a lot in Japan as a manager. Has learned to ‘inspect his expectations’ and has learned that communication and language is a far more valuable tool than he had previously thought.

 

Valentine ready to meet the challenges of managing the Red Sox head-on.

Ben Cherington on the spot. Valentine still excited.

Valentine tips cap to Francona.

Showing up on Hot Stove with Tom Caron and Don Orsillo

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Putting new Red Sox Manager Bobby Valentine into perspective

One thing’s for sure – wherever Bobby Valentine goes, noise is sure to follow.

After all, Valentine is a complex guy.

He’s known as an incredible in-game strategist who isn’t afraid to stray from the status quo. He’s generally as good at handling certain players as he is at losing others. He can be as engaging with the media as he is controversial. Above all – he loves a good challenge.

Truth be told – there is no certainty with a person like Bobby V. The chances of him succeeding are as high as they are of him getting vaporized in a high-pressure environment  like Boston – a place where he’ll be expected to be a cog in the machine, and not the machine itself.

No matter who you talk to – the opinions tend to err on the double-edged sword side. Valentine is the smartest guy in just about any baseball room, but that can be the problem sometimes.

Everyone’s got an opinion of Valentine. They love him. They hate him. Some possess a little of both. But regardless of where you come down in the debate, there’s one thing that might be agreed upon by all – this is Valentine’s last chance. And it’s that very thing that – I think – leaves room for a lot of cautious optimism about his future as manager of the Boston Red Sox.

Earl Weaver used to say – “it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” I think that Valentine is a guy who’s reinvented himself during his time away from Major League Baseball. He left and managed in Japan. He became a Public Safety Director in his own town. He became an analyst on ESPN. Valentine is older, wiser and I think he’ll approach the job with more care this time around.

Bobby Valentine, the guy who knows it all, suddenly is willing to learn. He even said so. “I view this as a growth experience.”

Don’t think he won’t be outspoken. Don’t think he won’t still be the enigmatic personality he’s always been. But do think that you’ll see a wiser, more polished Bobby V that has likely learned from his mistakes; A man who is more comfortable sharing and stepping back from the spotlight if it means winning games and adding to his resume.

After all – it should be a lot easier to do that considering the kind of talent he has to work with. Not that he’s ever needed super talented teams in order to win baseball games in the past. In 15 years as a Major League manager, his teams have only performed worse than expected twice. He has an extensive history of turning under-achievers into good teams. The fact that this team is already very good should make that a lot easier.

This is the guy who took the Mets to a World Series with an outfield of Benny Agbayani, Jay Payton and Derek Bell, after all.

Managers and coaches don’t often enjoy success in multiple places and you’d think that here in Boston, we’d have learned that past performance isn’t always an indicator of future performance. Right?

• When Joe Torre was hired by the Yankees, he was seen as a retread puppet who was nothing more than a middling manager. Today, he’s Yoda to baseball fans in New York and is seen as an ambassador to his former team and the game as a whole – all in spite of writing a scathing book about the organization.

• Phillies fans laughed when they heard a guy named Terry Francona was picked to manage the Red Sox. Even in the face of helping contribute to the worst collapse in the history of baseball, Francona is still seen as untouchable and the greatest manager in the franchise’s history among names like Dick Williams, Ed Barrow and Jimmy Collins.

• When Bill Belichick became the head coach of the New England Patriots, he was seen as a failure in Cleveland that seemed like a last-ditch grab for a flailing franchise. Today, he’s a sure-fire Hall of Famer and is considered one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game.

• Claude Julien. Enough said.

These guys all sucked in other places. They were under-estimated by their peers. But they were most alike in the most important category of all: They were the right guys at the right time.

Is Bobby Valentine that guy? I think he might be. But what I do know is that this is a good situation for someone like Valentine to thrive: high exposure, high reward, little margin for error and motivation to get it right this time.  That in and of itself is reason for optimism.

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Red Sox Nation needs to take a breather on the managerial search

Cherington and Lucchino (Credit: Jim Rogash/Getty Images)

‘We’re going to take a breather,’ said Boston Red Sox GM Ben Cherington about the team’s recent managerial search. Truth be told, the Red Sox aren’t the only people who need one.

Red Sox Nation needs to calm down. Big time.

To be honest, this whole process is beginning to hurt my skull. Not because of the Red Sox, but because of the media and fans. I’m so wiped out by it all, that it’s pretty much impossible for me to coherently scribble out some lavish soliloquy as to why the coverage of this managerial search sucks, so I’m just going to bullet this stuff out and hope for the best.

• Why was the team not offering Dale Sveum the job over lunch on Wednesday taken as Ben Cherington being ‘overruled’ and ‘undercut’? First of all, Cherington had said on Tuesday that the team was likely going to be bringing in other people for a second interview. Known. F-ing. Fact. Right? So then wouldn’t logic dictate that they probably wouldn’t offer Sveum the job on the spot, or has the media just been overcome with the sheer number of ants in their pants? I know ‘team sources’ (there they are again… they say the darndest things) kept saying that Sveum was the front-runner, but other than these shadows lurking in the periphery, who ever even remotely suggested it publicly?

• Who said the Red Sox didn’t like Sveum? Could it ever occur to people that maybe the Red Sox did like him, but the Cubs liked him more?

• The hemming and hawing over Bobby Valentine is also kind of silly. He’s one of four publicly known candidates. And no, this isn’t Darth Lucchino whipping out his light saber to teach young Jedi Cherington a lesson in ‘I AM IN CHARGE, SON’.  Managerial candidates frequently apply for positions under the condition that their candidacy be kept a secret. Why? Because losing out on a position early on in the process can be potentially damaging to their reputations. In their view at least. So anyway – it’s often a common courtesy extended from teams to candidates. Valentine has been known to have been on Lucchino’s list of favorite people in baseball and Cherington liked him too. I’d be shocked to find out that Cherington wasn’t in the mix on Valentine from the beginning.

• Also according to another UNNAMED SOURCE~!, Michael Silverman is reporting there is a second unknown, super top-secret candidate. I’d certainly be excited to find out who that might be, too.

• And for the love of all this is holy, can we please just drop the ‘no one wants to manage the Red Sox because they are EVIL~!’ clap trap? Please? These people have heinously short memories that apparently don’t date as far back as George Steinbrenner calling his manager a drunkard in public, or the other 12 million souls Boy George would roast on the fire during his tenure as the owner of the Yankees. Even in spite of all that, George almost always had the pick of the litter. Why? Because the Yankees were and have always been viewed as one of the premier managerial jobs to have in baseball. Same for the Red Sox. Just because this wasn’t a good fit for Mike Maddux or Dale Sveum (assuming that was why he signed with the Cubs – was because he didn’t want to be here), doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of good candidates who wouldn’t burn their mother’s bodies to manage this team. Just sayin’.

And last of all – let’s not forget this: From the moment this started, Cherington has been up front about how this process is going to be a ‘collaborative’ one. In fact, he said this last week:

“I feel my job is to identify a very small, short list of people that I think could be a fit for us – and I may have a personal preference on who the next manager is – then I give as much information as I can to ownership. They clearly have an important voice in this decision, and they need to be comfortable with the decision as much as I am. In the end, when we start to narrow the list down, I think it’ll be more collaborative at that point. To this point, it’s been more my effort on getting to know the candidates. As we get to the next level, they will get more involved.”

They’ve been saying this stuff from the beginning. It’s time to just let it play out.

So let’s take the ole’ GM’s advice and take a breather this weekend. We’ll have a manager soon enough.

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