A Made Man in Japan

“Bobbeeee!” They recognize him wherever he goes. Even out of uniform -- no ball cap, no big No. 2 on his back -- everyone in Tokyo seems to know who Bobby Valentine is.

“Bobbeeee!” They shout and try to shake his hand (he hates that) or take his picture with their cellphone cameras.

Having Bobby Valentine on your cellphone is a very cool thing in Japan right now.

Always popular, Valentine has become an even bigger star in the week since his Chiba Lotte Marines, the team from the Tokyo ‘burbs and the standing joke of Japanese baseball, defied the usual skeptics and socked their way to the club’s first championship in 31 years.

“Bobby Magic,” the media here call it. “Bobby’s Family” read the newspaper headline under the team’s victory photo after they swept the Hanshin Tigers from Osaka in four games to win the Japan Series. If people have heard the speculation that Valentine may leave Japan to manage the Dodgers, no one is going to be rude enough to ask him if it’s true.

Tokyo is Bobby’s Town.

Take the crowd in Shibuya on Friday evening, the neon glowing over one of Tokyo’s hippest and busiest neighborhoods. Valentine is standing at Shibuya’s famous intersection with three buddies from college days who came over to see the final series -- “the Goons,” he calls them affectionately -- when a murmur begins to surf the crowd.

“Is it Bobby?” people ask, and suddenly he and his friends are surrounded, like a milestone home-run ball that has landed in the bleachers. Ten, 20, 50 people with more coming, all thrusting cellphones into his face until finally Valentine calls a halt and strides away.

He leads the Goons across the intersection and into a pachinko parlor, the Japanese gambling arcades that are a cross between slots and pinball. People sit at machines, transfixed, as thousands of tiny steel balls tumble about in a deafening rattle. They look as if their fate is in those balls. But an old woman recognizes Valentine and abandons her post at the machine to ask for an autograph.

When Valentine steps toward her, he accidentally kicks over a bucket of pachinko balls. Thousands of the tiny steel balls roll down the aisles and scatter under machines.

“It’s OK, it’s OK, Bobby,” says the owner, rushing up to soothe him. She doesn’t want Valentine to be upset. Staff members grab brooms. The Americans escape into the neon night.

Suddenly the owner is chasing after them. “Bobby!” she shouts. He left without giving her an autograph. “Arigato” -- thank you -- Valentine says as he bows and signs. She’s over the moon.

Yep. This is Bobby’s Town.

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Understanding Bobby Valentine’s place in Japan -- and what success in Japanese baseball means to him -- is essential to understanding why leaving here would be a tougher call than anyone in L.A. could imagine, should the Dodgers make an offer.

Valentine back in Dodger blue? A reunion with Tommy Lasorda, his long-ago minor league manager and mentor? What’s to hesitate on? Why be coy?

“I’m not kidding anybody, I think it would be great to manage the Dodgers,” Valentine says as he drives home after recording a postseason interview for Japanese TV. “Especially when Tommy’s still alive, especially when I still have this great energy to get around that city.

“If they’re sure I’m the guy they need, that there’s a fit, it might happen to be the right thing.”

Whether the Dodgers can afford Valentine might be another matter.

According to a source close to the Marines, Valentine made $2.95 million this year, maxing out on his bonuses, in the second year of a three-year contract. Incentives in Japan can be linked to anything, unlike in major league ball, so a new contract for Valentine could be structured around bonuses for victories above a specified number, each round of playoffs or other team accomplishments.

It’s expected that he will be offered a three-year extension worth $4 million a year, plus incentives, as a starting point, with the understanding that it will rise during the negotiation process.

In any event, Valentine bristles at suggestions that Japan is baseball purgatory, a place he came to in order to get more games under his belt while waiting for a “real” opportunity in major league baseball to come his way. He sees himself as uniquely positioned to break down the provincial, chauvinistic instincts of baseball people on both sides of the Pacific.

These are two very different baseball cultures, he argues, each with its merits, each ignoring the best of the other at its peril. And if he leaves Japan, he worries that he’ll be sending a signal that Japanese baseball is less significant than major league ball.

“Look,” he says, “I have friends who have said, ‘I know you can’t wait to get back, I hope someone offers you a job.’ And I wonder where I went wrong in my friendship for them not to understand. What is it that they don’t get?”

What they miss, say Valentine and those who know him best, is that he has climbed a personal and professional mountain in Japan. He has taken a team that was a byword for failure to a title -- not just its first since the 1970s when the Marines wore uniforms with pink trim, but his first championship as a manager and the first by a foreign manager in Japan.

“People in the U.S. can’t fully appreciate the significance of what he’s done in this baseball culture,” says Jim Small, vice president of international market development for Major League Baseball, who has known Valentine since he managed in Texas in the 1980s. “You have to know what this means to him. Unless you know Bobby and the importance he places on loyalty, it’s hard to understand why there would be a conundrum about leaving.”

The Japan Series victory was even sweeter because it represented a successful second act for Valentine in Japan. His first experience managing here, for the Lotte Marines in 1995, ended in tears after only one season.

Valentine led the 1995 team to a surprising second-place finish but was fired by General Manger Tatsuro Hirooka at the end of the season after clashing with his Japanese coaching staff over, among other things, his resistance to their grueling practice routines and long team meetings. In one incident, Valentine ordered his team to take a day off, only to find his players and coaches defiantly holding a practice at the park.

Friends recall Valentine phoning home to the U.S., incredulous at what “they” were doing to him. The prevailing narrative about that first managerial stint -- at least among English-language baseball writers -- portrays Valentine as an on-field success who was popular with fans but ran into a wall of anti-foreigner resentment from coaches, executives and the Japanese media.

It’s a version that Valentine refuses to subscribe to now.

“I came here the first time with the idea it was just a little place to hang up my clothes for a while until I got another job in the States,” he says. “I was pig-headed. I was trying to move mountains with a bulldozer, and it wasn’t going to happen as quickly as I wanted it to happen.

“But I wasn’t 55; I was 45. I didn’t have 20 years’ experience; I had 10. And I made it tough on myself.”

Valentine laughs when he says he’s the only manager to have been fired in the American League (Rangers), the National League (Mets) and Japan. But he also says his failure in Japan burned inside him as “unfinished business” over the years.

“I didn’t make the difference here that I wanted to make,” he says. “I think I made a difference in Texas. I made a difference in New York. ...

“But when I left here the last time, it was worse. I didn’t like that notch on my belt.”

Valentine was living in Connecticut, doing ESPN baseball broadcasts, when Marine owner Akio Shigemitsu, son of the owner who had hired him the first time, came calling in 2003 to see whether Valentine would return to Japan for another try. He was back listening to his Japanese lessons on his iPod even before the contract was signed.

“Bobby enjoyed ESPN and he was good at it, but he was bored,” his wife, Mary, says. “And when Bobby Valentine is bored, it’s not a good thing.”

For Valentine, what happened between the white lines in Japanese baseball was the easy part. The tougher challenge was finding the proper calibration of American and Japanese philosophies.

The notion that he opposed practices was “lost in translation last time,” he says. Indeed it is the Japanese emphasis on practicing skills and fundamentals that leads him to argue that the best in Japan can compete with the World Series winner.

It’s a line that most baseball people in America scoff at -- the Marines’ foreign talent this year included borderline major leaguers Benny Agbayani and Matt Franco, who had played for Valentine with the Mets -- as more of Bobby’s bluster.

But Valentine counters that Major League Baseball is arrogant.

“I watched the White Sox; we play better than the White Sox,” he says. “We don’t throw balls in the dirt. We don’t throw balls over the first baseman’s head. We hit the cutoff man every time.

“When I say we play better it’s not because we are better players. It’s because we practice better.”

Where Valentine differed most noticeably from his Japanese counterparts was in his handling of players. Japanese baseball thrives on hierarchy between owners, managers and players, all sticking to their roles in a strict code. The team trumps the player and managers rule through fear. Let your teammates down by going 0 for 4 and expect to put in a couple of more hours of batting practice after the game. Make an error in the field and you might get yanked -- in mid-inning.

Valentine brought a softer approach to handling his players, trying to get them to not fear failure. No one got chewed out, though players were encouraged to display emotion.

“All the Japanese players seem to be playing in neutral,” he says. “I wanted our guys to enjoy their successes and enjoy their failures. It was going to be OK to hit a double and clap your hands at second base. And it was going to be all right to come back to the dugout after a strikeout or an error, and kick your helmet. I allowed them to do that.”

Besides, Valentine says with a big smile, “I think fans like it.”

The Marines won the title away from home and their enthusiastic fans. The Tigers were never in the series, losing, 10-1, 10-0 and 10-1 before putting up a slight struggle in Game 4.

The championship was won in Hanshin’s Koshien Stadium, where the stands were so shaky there were fears the bleachers might collapse if visiting Marine fans celebrated with their signature tatenori -- literally “vertical movement.”

Americans would recognize it as pogo-ing.

Valentine watched the game from the top step of the dugout, shifting nervously, slapping butts and high-fiving his players when they returned to the bench after good plays. After taking an early three-run lead, the Marines withstood a Hanshin comeback that relied on a bad-hop RBI single and wrapped it up with a strikeout for a 3-2 win, followed by the obligatory mob scene near the mound.

Afterward, Valentine stood in foul territory off third base and on national TV used the occasion to thank Hirooka, the GM in 1995, for giving him “the opportunity to manage in this great country.” And he thanked owner Shigemitsu “for having the faith to bring me back.” On the big screen, he was visibly emotional.

Then it was on to the ritual Japanese beer shower that is held, not spontaneously in the dressing room, but at a nearby luxury hotel precisely two hours after the game. The hotel taped plastic sheeting over every exposed surface and the players -- some prepared with swimming goggles -- went nuts for about half an hour, pouring hundreds of bottles of beer and champagne over each other.

Up on stage in front of them, Valentine had goggles on too. His players charged the stage a few times and soon he was soaked in beer, his gray hair matted to his head. The players started chanting, and Valentine began jumping up and down, doing the Marines’ bounce.

Then he threw his head back and started to holler.

“Arigato!” he screamed into the Japanese night. “Arigato!”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Bobby Valentine file

* Born: May 13, 1950, in Stamford, Conn.

* Player: With Dodgers, Angels, San Diego Padres, New York Mets and Seattle Mariners (1969-1979).

* Manager: With Texas Rangers (1985-1992), Mets (1996-2002), and Japanese Pacific League’s Chiba Lotte Marines (1995; 2003-present).