|
Print-friendly version The dark side of baseball's brightest star Bobby Valentine is the first foreign manager to win the Japan Series in Japanese baseball's 70-year history. Bobby Valentine, "the gentleman of baseball," has his explosive moments off-camera, says Asahi Geino (11/3). "During a game, when one of his players is ruled out in a close call, he has been known to bellow what sounds like 'F**k!'" the no-nonsense weekly (which spells out the word in bold uppercase type) hears from a sports journalist. "He can be pretty aggressive." He can be -- but quiet, friendly tact is more his style. It probably wouldn't work without the added ingredient of what Shukan Taishu (11/7) calls "Bobby magic," but with it it works fine. The Chiba Lotte Marines' championship -- the team's first in 31 years -- is proof. The Marines swept the Hanshin Tigers in four straight, making Valentine the first foreign manager to win the Japan Series in Japanese baseball's 70-year history. It's a compound brew, made up in equal parts of profound baseball knowledge and a maybe no less profound knowledge of human nature. "This season," a team insider tells Shukan Taishu, "he came up with no fewer than 128 batting orders." That's rare in Japanese baseball, the magazine comments. A juggling act on that scale had to be handled with delicacy if confusion and resentment were to be avoided. "He'd size up the team on the day of the match, taking stock of each player's condition," the team insider continues. "And then he'd decide on his batting order." One result: the opposing team never knew quite what to expect. If IT was thrown into confusion -- and maybe into a little resentment too -- so much the better. "Baseball is fun," Weekly Playboy (11/8) has him lecturing his charges at a particularly intense point in the playoffs. "I want you to feel that with every fibre of your being. If you can't, you're better off looking for another job." "Bobby" (everyone seems to be on a first-name basis with him) "never says a bad word about his players at the post-game press conferences," says a sports journalist Weekly Playboy speaks to. "On the contrary, he'd recite the names of all the players he thought had performed well. It was always a long, long list." "He was one of the rare masters of the art of using praise to motivate people," adds another Weekly Playboy source. Does Valentine, "known as a devoted husband," have a Japanese mistress? demands Asahi Geino. Rumors swirled. He was observed frequenting a little Chiba restaurant run by a woman in her 60s -- an unlikely suspect, you might think, but rumor, like love, is blind. "Of course there was nothing to it," Asahi Geino says. "He just liked the atmosphere of the place." He likes the atmosphere of Japan in general, it seems. A former manager of the New York Mets, Valentine has a year left of his three-year contract with the Marines. No sooner was the Marines' championship secured than he expressed an interest in pitting Japan's best against America's best. "I know we'd win at least a couple of games," he said. This is cache, read story here
|