Bobby Valentine Congratulates the Giants and Takes a Shot at the Red Sox in the Process
Congrats to Bruce and the Giants. Baseball men running a team of baseball players. Refreshing.
— Bobby Valentine (@BobbyValentine) October 30, 2014
Baseball men.
Baseball players.
Makes you wonder who won the thing last year. Cyborgs?
Here’s the thing as it pertains to Bobby Valentine’s perceived slight at his former employer: He wasn’t exactly rooting against the Red Sox last year as they went on to win the World Series.
“I picked them to win the division, the ALDS, the ALCS, and now the World Series,” Valentine, now the executive director of athletics at Sacred Heart University in Bridgeport, Conn., told the Globe as the Sox prepared to face the St. Louis Cardinals in the Fall Classic. “I’m rooting them on. The [12] guys left on that team that I managed were all good guys. I enjoyed all of them, so why wouldn’t I root for them?”
You could understand why Valentine wouldn’t have found it in his heart to pull for a franchise that had fired him only one year earlier, after he helped lead Boston to its most dour campaign in recent memory, a 69-win season that transformed Fenway Park from amusement park to complete clown show.
But we’ll take him at his word, even though his latest shot, disguised as congratulations to manager Bruce Bochy and the San Francisco Giants, seems clearly directed at the Red Sox front office of Larry, Ben, and Carmine.
“I’d like to think that if I came back for my second year that, given the changes and improvements, I would have been able to do the same thing,” Valentine told Nick Cafardo last October. “Ben did a great job this offseason rebuilding the team. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it before. Usually a team will go after one or two free agents and hope they work out. When you’re signing seven or eight guys and they all work out and blend in together as well as they did, that’s amazing to me. The entire organization should be very proud of what they did. They should take a bow. It was amazing work.”
Presumably, he feels the same way about the Giants, World Series champions for the third time in five years.
Valentine would probably argue that this wasn’t a shot at the Red Sox, and dip into his black book of excuses to wriggle his way out of that perception. I mean, only the Giants, Cardinals, and Red Sox have all won the thing since 2010. It’s only just now “refreshing?”
The Sacred Heart football team is 6-2, by the way. Football men running a team of football players, we can only assume.
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com