THE SECOND SUMMER OF BOBBY VALENTINE

MAY 17. 1973. IT WAS A strange twist of fate that oc-curred that day as one of baseball’s best young prospects lay on the warning track in Anaheim. California, his right leg broken in two places. Bobby Valentine had sprinted from his centerfield position and leaped up the wall to haul in a line drive off the bat of Oakland’s Dick Green. Vada Pinson was playing left field that day, and it was his job to communicate the state of peril to the man chasing the ball. The last thing Valentine remembers was Pinson saying. “You’re all right, Bobby.” As he came down his cleats caught in the fence, snapping his right leg. Bobby Valentine had just taken his last step as a promising young ballplayer and his first step toward becoming manager of the Texas Rangers. He was four days past his twenty-third birthday.

In the short run, Bobby Valentine was not all right. Though he returned to the Angels in 1974 and would eventually play six seasons with three more major league teams, he never regained his speed and range, and was relegated to part-time and utility play. Even under these trying circumstances he finished with a .260 career batting average. Still, his career was but a flicker compared to the bright light that was its promise.

But, today, at age thirty-six, as he enters his second full season as manager of the Rangers, the second year the club has been his to mold, it is safe to say that Valentine is indeed all right. He has one of the brightest young teams in baseball, he has five very successful restaurants, a wife, and a three-year-old boy, and he feels as though he’s just scratching the surface. He has fought adversity and climbed, lightning-quick, to the upper reaches of the managing profession. He has turned the Rangers around and has personally readjusted the thinking of fans disgusted with the Rangers’ succession of failures. In short, Valentine is the stuff from which movies are made. He’s young. He’s handsome. And two years ago only a handful of Metroplex sports fans had ever heard of him, let alone suspected he might be the team’s next skipper.

Remember May 16, 1985, the night Doug Rader was fired? One minute Rader, the man Valentine succeeded as manager, is getting into a cab in Chicago, mumbling something like no comment, and the next minute we have the image of this teenage-looking guy, rocking heel to toe with his hat pushed back slightly, describing how he has a very “human approach” to managing players. “Human?” we wondered, banging the side of the TV to make sure the sound was working. What does “human” have to do with baseball? Flip (he channels, Scott to Dale, and there’s the teenager again. He’s still talking about humans. Baseball players aren’t human, we have been taught to think. They’re property. Mercenaries. Talk to their lawyers or accountants or coaches maybe, but don’t treat them as people. That’s treating lions like kittens.

Two lines of speculation flowed from Valentine’s first days in Texas. The first had to do with this business of treating players as if they were real people. Another major league manager known for his personal approach. Tommy Lasor-da of the Dodgers, also happened to be Valentine’s first professional boss and close friend. This connection produced constant media prattle that Texas was just a bump in the road as the fledgling traveled west, a place to sharpen his as-yet untested managerial skills before moving on to Dodger blue as leader of the L. A. team. This talk persists and Valentine is tired of it. He knows that managers aren’t noted for paying off mortgages. but he doesn’t like what the rumor suggests.

“That someone would imply that I’m not committed or sincere about my job here, or anything I get involved in, upsets me,” he said this past January. “I will leave the Texas Rangers when I get fired.

“All this goes back to the winter leagues when I was a struggling major league player and Tommy was a struggling minor league manager. We would sit around and talk about how one day he would be team president and I would be manager. What else do you do at 2 a.m. in the Dominican Republic? What you’re hearing now is just the echoing of those conversations. But I’m getting tired of people asking me when I’m going to move,” Valentine says.

Veteran players like Charlie Hough and Larry Parrish (who have seen their share of Ranger managers), general manager Tom Grieve, and media people who travel with the team (like broadcaster Eric Nadel and Dallas Morning News writer Tracy Ringolsby) all agree that one of the most impressive traits Valentine brought to the Rangers, and perhaps the one the Rangers needed most, was his incredibly positive attitude combined with equal parts of enthusiasm and commitment. And none of them think he is going anywhere for a long time.

If Valentine’s wife, the former Mary Branca, has any say in it, the Valentines have made their last move. She is an accomplished equestrian, and their ten-acre spread in Arlington gives her a place where, for the first time, she can stable her horses at home. She loves it here.

As Tom Grieve put it, “Anyone who knows Bobby can attest to his commitment to this organization. Besides, if Bobby had stayed only two weeks, the Ranger organization would have been better for it.”

If Valentine had stayed just two weeks, his total managerial experience at that point would have been fourteen days. Which raises the second point: was he ready for the job? He was third-base coach for the New York Mets when the Rangers hired him. He had never managed a minor or major league team.

“He was the only player I ever had who I told that one day he would be an outstanding manager,” Tommy Lasorda said from the Dodger offices in Los Angeles. “From the very first he was always an excellent student of the game. He’s got all the attributes to be a great manager.”

Tom Grieve couldn’t agree more. “People always say to me what a gamble I took when I hired Bobby. To me it was the safest decision I’ve ever made. I knew he would be a successful major league manager.”

More on how Grieve knew that later, but rest assured that Valentine had unofficially tried on the manager’s hat before.

“Much to the chagrin of the managers I played for, I was always managing,” he explains. “I knew I was ready. Mostly it was a question of whether the situation was right. And people ask me why I would leave a team like the Mets, one that I was sure would be World Champions. Well, I was as involved with that team as I would ever be from my third-base coach position, and it wasn’t enough. I wanted a situation I could jump into with both feet. I wanted my own team.”

And now he has a team that is very much his, and in many ways more so than veteran managers. Grieve and his scouting staff have quite a bit of say in who gets invited to training camp, but Valentine has 100 percent control over who is on the team when they leave. He also chooses his entire coaching staff, which according to Grieve is also unusual. Almost as unusual as having pitchers warm up by throwing footballs, something Tom House, his scholarly looking pitching coach, experimented with last season. Valentine lets his coaches coach and he is always willing to try new tricks, new techniques. Combine those traits with an aggressiveness that borders on fool hardiness, and you get a style of baseball that the billboards call V-Ball.

And, shazam, it’s working. In 1985, Valentine inherited a losing team in an organization that was making noises about wanting to change. Ranger fans had heard that noise before. The season ran its course and the team finished last, with a record of 62-99. In ’86 Valentine cleaned house, played rookies, and finished 87-75. The Rangers packed up the mobile home (lava lamp and all), towed it out of the familiar swamps of last place, and parked the sucker right on Main Street, or, sans metaphor, in second place in the Western Division of the American League, only five games out of first. In short, the Rangers started to earn some respect, a commodity that had been foremost on Valentine’s mind.

“What I want is to develop tradition here,” he says. “Teams that have tradition have a definite edge. We have to be more than just the baseball team in town. We need to always be working on our image in the community. I want players to be proud to put on a Ranger uniform. I never want a player to want to leave.”

According to Ranger broadcaster Eric Nadel, it didn’t take long for other teams to see a difference. “By their second time around the league people were noticing. The Rangers were aggressive, they were confident, and they were obviously enjoying themselves. It was clear that this Ranger team was for real.”

As do most people associated with the club, Nadel has more to add when talking about Valentine’s influence on the Rangers.

“What really impressed me was that before every game Bobby would take about a half hour to sign autographs and talk with the fens. Very few managers around baseball would ever do that, and it certainly had never been done in my nine years here. After a while we started seeing players doing it, too. This kind of accessibility for the fans had never been there, and you could see they appreciated it.”

The 87-75 record posted by the 1986 Rangers was more than just a turnaround from an “off year”; it was a major departure for what had been an off franchise. The Rangers became only the fourth team to go from last place to second since divisional play began in 1969. They were the most improved team in the majors in 1986. And perhaps just as significant, they set a new attendance mark, breaking the old one by 170,000.

Metroplex baseball fans, as former Ranger Al Oliver says, “are waiting to explode” over the Texas Rangers. Consider that on opening day of 1986, more than 40,000 fans came out to see a team that had the second worst record in the American League the year before. Valentine feels that the Rangers turned the comer with their fans in 1986, citing what was actually an ugly fan incident as proof.

’’We ran a promotion, ball night, then went out and really stunk up the field. In the late innings about 150 fans threw the balls back on the field | narrowly missing outfielder Gary Ward]. In the past we would have had all the balls tossed back on the field and the next day in the papers it would read something like ’’the only shame was their poor aim.1 Instead, fans pointed out offenders to the security people and the press condemned the incident. We lost the game but we gained something more important.”

The eighty-seven wins of last season were amazing, but the way they came about was equally amazing. By mid-season, only nine players from the 1985 team remained on the roster. Rookie pitchers started 101 of the season’s 162 games. A rookie clean-up hitter (Pete Incaviglia) belted thirty home runs, tying the team record. A rookie short reliever (Mitch Williams) led the league in appearances with eighty. The Rangers came from behind to win forty-five times in 1986-a key statistic and a trait of any winning team-and twenty-two of those victories came in the seventh inning or later, Texas won twelve games at Arlington Stadium in the bottom of the ninth or in extra innings. The Rangers weren’t eliminated from the race until the 153rd game of the 162-game season. Then they finished strong, winning seven of the remaining nine games. For a team that, as Tracy Ringolsby said recently, “got to the point where they were conditioned for failure,” the Rangers showed a quality that wasn’t present in the past: character. And that is where Bobby Valentine comes in.

BOBBY VALENTINE SLIDES into the strategically chosen booth at one of his two Arlington restaurants. (He has three more in Connecticut.) He slides two cups of coffee across the table. Among the baseball cards scattered beneath the plexiglass top, the smiling visage of Vada Pinson springs out. Only in baseball.

It is just about opening time, and from where Valentine sits, he can see all the customers as they file in. He doesn’t seem much in the mood to talk. Trying to get even an hour or two of his time in this off-season has been like scheduling an audience with the Pope. But the Pope doesn’t have a wife and three-year-old boy who haven’t been getting as much time with him as the concerned parties would like in the time of year when baseball people reacquaint themselves with their loved ones. He has been roasted and toasted. sought out and awarded. Several different weeks have had him in Florida, Connecticut. Texas, back to Connecticut, and so on. This chat had to be scheduled for a Saturday. It was sunny out and he had yet to get on the tractor and work the horse area for Mary.

“Night and day does not adequately describe the difference between this off-season and last,” he explains, trying to snap his mind into gear. “Last year we had to call groups and see if they’d take us. This year we’ve actually had to say no a few times, It’s tough not getting 1o spend as much time with my son as I’d like, but it has been fun.”

“He’s been gone a lot,” echoes Mary, whose father, Ralph Branca, won eighty-eight games as a major league pitcher. She knows what a baseball family must often go through. “But when he’s home the first thing he asks is, ’What do you want me to do?’ He likes to get out on the tractor. I think it takes his mind off the restaurants and baseball for a while.”

Still. Valentine keeps his first love first in his mind. “I’ve actually been able to concentrate on the team more in this off-season because I already know who twenty to twenty-two of the players will be when we break camp. Last year there were just too many question marks.”

Baseball has an adage about managing. A team is made up of twenty-four players. Some like you, some don’t, and some haven’t made up their minds. The key is not to worry about the ones who like you and keep the ones who don’t away from the ones who haven’t made up their minds. However, this philosophy doesn’t apply to Bobby1 Valentine because it assumes that groups of players think alike. “The most unfair thing a person can do is treat everyone the same.” he says.

When Valentine looks at his team he sees twenty-four individuals, each one with a different button to push, a mechanism that makes them play hard and play one way: his. According to pitcher Charlie Hough, it is not so much that one manager’s style of play is superior to another. The trick is getting everyone on the team to play that one way.

“I guess if there is one philosophy I adhere to it is in putting individuals in a position to succeed.” Valentine says. “This is part of creating a winning environment.”

Never was this more evident than in last season’s most memorable Ranger game, an August matchup on national television with the league-leading Boston Red Sox (the eventual American League champions) and their overwhelming pitcher, Roger Clemens, who would win the Most Valuable Player award. At the time, Clemens’s record was a formidable 19-4.

Ten days prior to that game Valentine pulled Bobby Wilt, his young right-hander, from the pitching rotation. The manager had his reasons, but Witt didn’t like it. “That made him mad,” Valentine says. “I liked that; it was a good sign. At the time he was six and nine and people were practically demanding I send him back to the minors. Bobby is from Massachusetts. He grew up right next door to the Sullivan family |who own the Boston Red Sox], He idolizes Roger Clemens. 1 told him that his next start would be against the Red Sox. This was a chance for him to put the entire season behind him. It was bigger than an opening day.”

Witt, inspired, didn’t get the win that night, but he went seven strong innings, giving up only two runs. The real strategic move was made days before, unbeknownst to the public, but Valentine looked like a genius in the eighth inning when he inserted the light-hitting Geno Petralli to pinch-hit against Clemens. Petralli blasted a two-run homer to tie the game, and the sensational rookie Ruben Sierra won it for the Rangers with his own two-run shot in the ninth. And Bobby Witt did not lose a game the rest of the season, finishing 11-9. The strategic moves and his canny handling of players helped Valentine win the UPI Manager of the Year award in the American League.

Valentine sees building character as an ongoing aspect of managing, whether the team consists of veterans or rookies, whether it’s in a pennant race or not.

“Once the game starts, managing is much simpler because all the decisions are yes or no. Do I bunt? Yes or no. The hardest part of managing is what goes on before and after the game. Getting the team ready to play today and play again tomorrow. A lot of that is building character, Knowing your players. The only time I won’t have tomorrow in mind is the last game of the year.”

Part of what helps a manager is understanding how players feel about their role on the team. Bobby Valentine knew all the types as a player: the phenom, the blossoming star, the veteran recovering from injuries, the utility player.

How good a prospect was the young Valentine? He came out of one of the most famous free agent drafts by any single team in modern baseball, which occurred on June 7, 1968. That day the Los Angeles Dodgers drafted Steve Garvey, the durable first baseman who will one day be in the Hall of Fame; Bill Buckner, a career .295 hitter who starts for the American League champion Boston Red Sox; Ron Cey, a power-hitting third baseman who was a mainstay on the great Dodger teams of the Seventies and has hit more than 300 career home runs; and Joe Ferguson and Tom Paciorek. Both are now with the Rangers. Ferguson as a coach. Paciorek as a player. Both have had excellent major league careers.

Free agent drafts just don’t produce that many major league stars for one team. But consider this: Bobby Valentine was drafted by the Dodgers that day before any of the players listed above. In fact, he was the Dodgers’ number one pick, an eighteen-year-old out of Rippowan High School in Stamford, Connecticut.

“Absolutely one of the finest prospects I’ve ever seen,” says Tommy Lasorda. “The Garveys. The Ceys. The Buckners. Bobby would have been right there, if not better. One of the fiercest competitors who ever played for me.”

Lasorda first managed Valentine in Ogden, Utah, in 1968. They both moved up the Dodger ladder to Spokane in the Pacific Coast League, then the Dodgers’ top minor league team. In 1970, Garvey hit .319 for Spokane and Bill Buckner hit .335, but both were eclipsed by Bobby Valentine, who batted .340 and led the league in five offensive categories while being named Player of the Year. Then, in the league playoffs, he was hit in the face with a pitch. His run of bad luck had just begun.

Valentine played most of the 1971 season and all of the ’72 season in Los Angeles before being traded to the California Angels. It was a good trade for him, Valentine believes people should have fun at whatever they do, whether relaxing or at work. In his two years with the Dodgers, as opposed to his years with Lasorda in the minors, his enthusiasm and free spirit were not appreciated.

“1 was a radical,” he recalls. “Having fun was looked down on. California had just hired Bobby Winkles, who had coached in college in Arizona. He appreciated having fun while you played.”

Valentine had fun in California. On May 17, 1973, he was batting .302. He was on his way, it seemed. Then he met the wall.

Injuries are part of the game, of course. But Tommy Lasorda admits to being close to tears at times as he watched Valentine trying to come back from his leg injuries. “It’s incredible he came back to even play on a major league level with that kind of injury,” Lasorda says. “It took all the courage in the world for him to stay around as long as he did.”

Valentine had heart, but his leg was never the same. He was released by the Seattle Mariners after the 1979 season, washed up at age twenty-nine. In between were stops with the San Diego Padres and the New York Mets, as well as trips back to the minors. It was his stint with the Mets that proved to be significant in his future as a manager. There he played and roomed with Tom Grieve, a former Ranger who in 1984, at age thirty-six, would become their general manager, the youngest to hold that position in the majors.

In New York, Grieve and Valentine became fast friends. They talked baseball constantly, pretending Grieve was the general manager and Valentine the manager. They made hypothetical player deals and won plenty of hypothetical pennants. Years later, when the Rangers started the 1985 season at 9-23, Tom Grieve knew it was time to hire a new manager. And he knew who to call,



THE 1987 SEASON OPENS ON APRIL 6, AND fan expectations are extremely high. Tom Grieve, who as GM is a professional realist, tries to temper his optimism: “We are definitely looking two and three years down the road.”

There is a group, however, whose expectations are higher than those of even the most optimistic fan: the Ranger players. The young and the veterans alike say they fully expect to be in the middle of a pennant race come September. And what does the skipper say?

“Last year we were interested in proving we could compete. We wanted to show that the heat wouldn’t burn us out. When we were in the race in September, we’d accomplished that. You know, if California hadn’t won twenty-five of thirty-one during the toughest part of their schedule we would have won the division.”

That’s another curious aspect of baseball. You can play well but another team might play better. Without the wild card teams that swell the football playoffs, second place is never any better than second place. In 1954, the Yankees won 103 of 154 games and finished eight games out of first.

“A lot depends on how well the other teams play. I think we’ll be very good.”

This winter the Rangers lost Gary Ward to free agency, leaving them with a very young outfield of Pete Incaviglia, Oddibe McDow-ell (the oldster of the group, with one-and-a-half seasons under his belt), and Ruben Sierra. Valentine admits that if one of these players goes down with an injury, they’ll miss Ward. The infield is set but for second base; early expectations are for rookie Jerry Browne to fill that spot. First baseman Pete O’Brien has quietly become an offensive force in the league. The pitching will be good. But as both Larry Parrish and Al Oliver explain, the second year in the majors is often a player’s toughest (“the sophomore jinx”), and no less than seven key Rangers will be second year players in 1987.

But this doesn’t worry Valentine, who believes that optimism and fierce competitiveness can move mountains. Savor these next few years. We may be witnessing the beginning of the Ranger dynasty. If so, you’ll have Bobby Valentine to thank.