He’s Managed to Get Back Into Baseball

The ball was catchable. It came out of the lights at a high arc, and the left fielder thought he had a bead on it. He felt the warning track crunch under his spikes, but he kept going. He saw at the last minute that he was going to have to climb the chain-link fence to get to it, but he didn’t even hesitate.

He got to the ball, all right. He got a glove on it, but it popped right out and flopped over the fence. Bobby Valentine thought “Damn! I gave up a home run!”

Bobby Valentine had given up more than a home run. He had just given up a career. The reason he didn’t catch the ball was because he was hanging upside down at the time on what was left of a right leg.

It had hit the fence, caught in the links and been broken in so many places that it looked more like a corkscrew than a leg. The knee exploded, the toes pointed the wrong way, and when Valentine wanted to know if he would ever be able to play again, the doctors’ reaction was, “Play what?” Not anything you had to do standing up.

Bobby Valentine at that time was having the kind of year the experts knew he could have. He was batting .302 with 11 runs scored and 13 batted in, and had 5 doubles and 2 triples, even though the season was only a little over three weeks old.

Valentine was once a member in good standing of the Dodgers’ celebrated Little Blue Wrecking Crew, a passel of can’t-miss young ballplayers who terrorized minor league pitching in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. There were Steve Garvey, Bill Russell, Ron Cey, Davey Lopes, Billy Buckner and Tom Paciorek, and a lot of people thought Bobby Valentine was the best of them.

He was a football and track star in his native Connecticut. USC, no less, was after him with a football scholarship. So were Notre Dame and, probably, the Green Bay Packers.

He was fast, strong, heady in all sports but he opted for baseball, even though he scored 53 touchdowns in his high school career, won the State 60-yard dash and could dribble a basketball through the German army.

He tore up every minor league he ever was in. He led the Pioneer League in runs and stolen bases and, in 1970, he led the Pacific Coast League in everything--batting at .340, runs with 122, hits with 211, doubles with 39, triples with 16, total bases with 324, even sacrifice flies with 10. The Dodgers thought they had the next Pete Rose.

No one quite knows what happened to Bobby with the Dodgers. It is clear he was not Manager Walter Alston’s Valentine. Bobby thought he was the team’s shortstop of the future. Manager Alston thought Billy Russell was.

That is how Valentine found himself playing left field for the Angels on May 17, 1973. It was an unaccustomed position for him. He did not expect the Oakland batter, Dick Green, who was to hit only three home runs all year, to get the ball that far.

When Valentine returned to baseball a year later, his right leg looked like a bag of potatoes with a sock on it and his big edges, speed and balance, were gone.

The annals of baseball are replete with stories of young athletes whose careers were cut short by tragic accidents.

What makes Bobby’s different is, he has bobbed up as something no one had ever thought this funny Valentine could become--a successful big league manager.

Bobby drifted haplessly around the minor leagues for several years after his accident. He never became the multimillion-dollar star he might have been. He became that saddest of baseball flotsam, the perennial minor leaguer whose future is behind him.

But he saw a side of baseball the bubblegum-card types never see. Bobby saw baseball where it is played only by those who know it and love it. Bus-ride baseball. Two-to-a-room baseball. Five-dollars-a-day-meal-money baseball. Baseball where the lights are low and so is the pay. Dish-night baseball. Hit-the-sign-and-win-a-free-suit baseball. Baseball as it used to be--will always be. This is how Casey Stengel learned baseball.

Would Bobby Valentine have become a gifted manager if he had been a big star? Would he have listened at the feet of the grizzled old types who run the game on a shoestring in places where the showers leak, the umpires guess and dreams die lingering deaths?

Bobby Valentine took a lackluster pack of ballplayers in Arlington, Tex., last year and, by dint of enthusiasm and youthful fire, moved them up by 25 games, from last to second place in the standings.

It is no secret Bobby Valentine is the longtime protege of Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda. Recalls Lasorda: “When he called me up to tell me he had been offered the Texas job but some people advised him to reject it, I told him to hang up the phone right then and there and accept it! When the fruit is ripe, pick it!”

It has been taken for granted in baseball that the long-range plan for the Dodgers is for Lasorda to move into the front office and for Valentine to take over the team.

That front-office hit-and-run play will be as ticklish as a suicide squeeze. Valentine has a contract in Texas through 1989.

But would two clubs be fighting for his services if he hadn’t gone after Dick Green’s drive that day long ago in Anaheim? If he had said, “Aw, hell, that’s outta here!” and nonchalanted a pursuit?

But if Bobby Valentine had done that, he wouldn’t be where he is, anyway. He’d be a greeter in a restaurant somewhere--probably New Haven. Bobby means to collect from the game for that shattered leg yet.