Bobby Valentine to Westport Rotary: 'Luck is the Residue of Design'

By Roy Fuchs

of the Westport Rotary

High energy former baseball player, coach and manager Bobby Valentine talked to Westport Rotary last week about luck “as a driving force.” But luck only opened doors for him. When it opened, he performed. And well enough during a glamorous career to have had success many times over - though not always.

Cub president Steve Lewine introduced Valentine, who told the group that he is the only man to manage in the American League, the National League and in Japan.

Valentine quipped “I’m also the only manager to have been fired by teams in three leagues.” But he did win a championship in Japan with the Chiba Lotte Marines, and he led the Mets to the World Series in 2000 - where that other New York team (whose name hurts a Red Sox fan to mention) beat them.

Valentine grew up in Stamford. He said he was lucky to enter ninth grade the year the city “decides to close its junior high schools and move ninth grade to the high schools.” He learned the football team’s plays as a freshman, knew them when practice started his sophomore year and became - and remains - the only three year All-State football player.

And he was All-County shortstop as a ninth grader. Two years later luck found this “hotshot” playing a baseball game when a college coach, who also coached in the Cape Cod summer league — a league for promising college stars — happened to be watching.

“This hotshot had one of the great days of my life.” He was invited to play on the Cape - the only high school player. He did well enough to get noticed by the Los Angeles Dodgers, who drafted him in the first round, and fifth overall, two years later.

In 1968, as a senior, he was flying around the country as a football recruit. In May, he was being shown around the University of Southern California by All American OJ Simpson, the tailback whom he was scheduled to replace.

Simpson had to leave and dropped Valentine at the baseball field. A man sitting nearby recognized “the hotshot player,” and gave him a transistor radio that said “Dodgers” on it. “Keep this. The Dodgers are the greatest.”

A month later he was drafted. “I got on the plane to fly to Ogden, Utah to start my baseball career. I was met at the airport by the guy who gave me the radio - Ogden Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda.”

“So, randomly, what are the chances of all these things happening to make a lucky guy even more lucky?”

He earned the league MVP award, and again at Spokane in 1970, where he led another Lasorda managed team to the Pacific Coast League championship.

He joined the Dodgers in 1970, but was traded to the California Angels in 1972. He broke his leg badly the next year, lost much of his speed, but still came back to play for two other teams - one the Mets - before retiring in 1979.

He left baseball, and, among other things, opened Bobby Valentine’s Sports Cafe in Stamford. He returned as a coach in 1983 and became the Texas Rangers manager in 1985. In 1992 he was fired by team Managing Partner George W. Bush.

In 1995 he went to Japan to manage Chiba Lotte, but lasted only one season. He returned to the same team ten years later, won the Japan League Series his first year and remained their manager through 2009.

He was hired to manage the Boston Red Sox in 2012. The team had its worst season in 47 years, and Valentine was let go four days after the season ended. But, he told the group, “I was also the only guy who can say he managed the Red Sox during their 100th year.”

He summed up his life in baseball, saying, “Luck is the residue of design. I believe that. We appreciate that there is this luck. And that you work hard. But that you appreciate that it isn’t your hard work only.”

Photo: Bobby Valentine (credit: U.S. consulate in Osaka, Japan)