By Robert Whiting (2021)
Bobby Valentine, the former manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines, has published a memoir, with some interesting observations about Japan in it, among other things.
The memoir covers Valentine’s covers his entire career as player, manager and media personality that started in 1969 when Valentine was a star high school athlete who signed with the LA Dodgers out of high school. He had great potential and in this memoir Valentine even compares himself to Ichiro, but was unfortunately denied Ichiro-like greatness by an injury he sustained one day in 1973 when he caught his spikes in a chain link fence attempting to catch a home run ball. The injury was a severe one and he never fully recovered. Instead, he was forced to retire as a player from baseball in 1979 after playing with five different MLB teams.
After a stint as manager of Texas Rangers, Valentine was hired by the Chiba Lotte Marines in 1995 and led the team to a surprise second place finish. However, he was summarily fired by team GM Tatsuro Hirooka despite having a two-year contract. Hirooka thought Valentine was too lax in training the players.
Valentine went on to manage the New York Mets, leading them to a World Series appearance versus the New York Yankees, losing in five games. After he was fired at the end of the 2002 season, Valentine returned to manage the Marines in 2004, on the invitation of Lotte owner Akio Shigemitsu. Valentine’s popularity exploded in Japan in 2005 when he led the Marines to a Japan Championship climaxed by a four-game sweep of the Hanshin Tigers. As a result, he became the first foreigner to win the Shoriki Award. He was also named an honorary citizen of Chiba and a street in his neighborhood was named “Valentine’s Way.” In the aftermath of victory, he claimed his team, the Marines, was as good as any in the world and issued a challenge to the 2005 world series champions the Chicago White Sox for a Real World Series.
White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen replied, “Are you joking? The Chiba Lotte marines would not even win 20 games if they played in a full season in MLB.”
Valentine made many innovations in Chiba, as he recounts in the book, letting children run the bases, signing countless autographs everyday before each game in the stands before an opening in the screening, allowing fans to come down on the field to take photos with the players after games and tirelessly performing other PR functions, including setting up a food court and a karaoke stage. A champion ballroom dancer in high school, he gave ballroom dancing lessons to female fans before games. Also, in a break with Japanese customs, he allowed a players to go home for the birth of a child.
Valentine learned to speak Japanese. And at one point Shigemitsu declared that Valentine could be ‘manager for life’ in Lotte.
But things went sour after Shigemitsu hired former Hawks executive Ryuzo Setoyama in 2004, elevating him to General Manager in 2005 and elevated him to team president in 2006. The two men did not get along. Setoyama resisted Valentine’s attempts to make further changes (such as for Lotte to buy a team in the Independent League). Valentine was not invited back after his contract expired in 2009.
Valentine says in the book, the reason he left in 2009 was that Lotte wanted to go back to the Japanese way of things, but there were other factors that Bobby V. chose not to relate.
For example, Valentine’s salary of $4 million a year was a sore point in the Lotte organization. So was his ego.
Valentine thought Setoyama, a traditional bureaucrat with a business background, unqualified to lead a team like Lotte. As Valentine’s supporters were quick to point out, with some condescension, Setoyama did not even know how to use e-mail, the medium through which Valentine most communicated. Setoyama felt disrespected by the American gaijin.
Case in point was when a film crew from New York had come to do a documentary about the Marines in 2007, The Zen of Bobby V, the crew was told NOT to interview Setoyama, according to Valentine assistant Larry Rocca. There was also an angry behind the scenes confrontation one night in 2009 at a dinner meeting Valentine and Setoyama over management of the team, the details of which Valentine revealed to the press angering Setoyama and owner Shigemitsu.
NHK’s Toru Takagi who had made two documentaries about Valentine and praised his skill at molding young players, told me “Valentine’s need to constantly be the center of attention is a cause for concern. It makes it difficult for him to show his good side.”
Setoyama had his arrogant side as well. He was reported to have responded to noisy fan demonstrations opposing news of Valentine’s firing by saying “…if we have unworthy fans like this, let’s just move our home stadium. It’s just a bunch of stupid Chiba fans anyway.”
Among the interesting revelations in the book include the fact that during Valentine’s tenure at the helm of the NY Mets , team GM Steve Philips purchased the contract of Satoru Komiyama in 2001 hailing him in the press as an ‘ace reliever.’ However, problem was Philips had misread the Statistics sheet on Komiyama thinking mistakenly that GS was ‘Games Saved’ not ‘Games Started.”
Also, when Valentine pushed the Mets to win the bid for Ichiro when he was posted by Orix in 2001—he told the Mets that Ichiro was ‘one of the top five talents in the world’–Philiips replied, “We don’t need a singles hitter,’ and made a low bid.
Among other observations, Valentine noted that the NPB umpires favored Softbank manager Sadaharu Oh, whom Valentine called “the most respected man in Japanese baseball,” in their decisions. He called Hanshin Tiger fans among the ‘most amazing in the world,” and said that former Lotte infielder Koichi Hori “belonged in the major leagues.”
Valentine also complained about owner Tsuneo Watanabe whom he called ‘the supreme commander’ of Japanese baseball and said that he resisted change. “Watanabe-san ran Japanese baseball and most everything I wanted to do he frowned upon. (like offering big money contracts to Japanese stars to keep them from going to the States). Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh agreed with me. We were hoping Watanabe-san would step down but it never happened.. I got tired of banging my head against the wall.”.
Valentine went on to manage the Boston Red Sox for one disastrous season in which he incurred the wrath of players and fans alike. He spent time in the broadcast booth then hired on as Athletic Director at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut and in 2021 made an unsuccessful run for mayor of Stamford, Connecticut.
In sum, Valentine was a brilliant manager with a larger than life personality. He had a career to be proud of and his book is worth reading despite the above mentioned omissions.
END
For purposes of contrast, the following is the first review of Valentine’s book in the US, by Ron Kaplan in BookReporter.
“To read VALENTINE’S WAY, no one… was faster, played better defense or had a better baseball brain than Valentine.
“To hear Valentine tell it, he was one of the greatest athletes to come down the pike, and if not for a serious leg injury — which he reports was medically mishandled by the doctors — he might be in the Hall of Fame. He was Ichiro before there was Ichiro, he claims, invoking the name of the superstar who, after a great career in Japan, came to the US to become a future Hall of Famer.
“Overall, his teams — including the Texas Rangers and a disastrous single season with the Boston Red Sox — had a collective record of 1,186-1,165. Whatever shortcomings they suffered were, according to Valentine, not his fault, but rather those of subpar or malcontent players, duplicitous general managers and agents, or just plain bad luck.”
“Valentine did enjoy some success in his second stint as a manager in Japan, which he reminds the reader came as a result of his innovative ways. Those chapters are a bit less interesting, however, as he throws around a lot of unfamiliar names.
“You may agree or disagree with Valentine’s version of how his life progressed. As one might expect, such hubris rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. They included fans, sports radio hosts and sportswriters who were out to get him, misrepresenting his comments, although a careful reading will show a degree of disingenuousness on his part…you get a sense of paranoia.”
Tokyo Junkie 