THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 29, 1996 TAG: 9609290187
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM ROBINSON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: 84 lines
Among the pictures of former New York Mets managers on Bobby Valentine's office walls is one of Joe Torre, who is busy about now preparing his Yankees for the American League playoffs.
Across this two-team town, at stark Shea Stadium on a late-September Friday night, the new Mets manager is up to a different, lonesome task.
Valentine's five weeks of observation and evaluation of the Mets are almost over. Decisions on coaches and players will come soon. Strategies for spring training will follow.
So while New York shouts of Torre and his champions, Valentine sits inside Shea before another nothing game against the Phillies and talks softly of his team and ideals.
``Hope is the starting point of faith,'' says Valentine, promoted from Norfolk to succeed Dallas Green on Aug. 26. ``And faith is something you've got to have in order to get to the end.''
This is one thing that's changed since Bobby Valentine last managed in the major leagues. The brash 35-year-old who took over the Texas Rangers and ran them into the 1992 season was a head-first, change-the-world-now guy. There was little room for shades of gray or work in stages.
``I thought I could teach everyone better than anybody had ever been taught,'' Valentine once said.
This Bobby Valentine, when he parts his pursed lips, speaks with the caution of a man humbled by his past, and future.
``I'm much more realistic now, and I definitely know more of what a manager can and can't do and what affect he can have on a team,'' Valentine says. ``It's less than what I thought. I thought, like a lot of people, that there was a bit of magic, that there were words you could say. There aren't. It's too long a season for that.''
These five weeks have been fairly long in themselves, and there definitely has been no magic. The Mets were 59-72 when Valentine and his pitching coach Bob Apodaca ascended, and they were 11-18 through Friday. The season ends today.
Not that much more was expected. In a way, Valentine says, it's probably good that the Mets didn't take off on some crazy finish instead of sputtering home in character.
It might have produced a phony sense of accomplishment - ``counterfeit momentum,'' Valentine calls it - inside and outside of his clubhouse. And what the Mets, whose execution of fundamentals makes Valentine blanch, don't need is the notion that only a tweak here and there is needed for them to go from 20 below to 20 above break-even.
``This is more than fine-tuning,'' Valentine says of his mission. ``And there are no guarantees that just because the calendar changes, things are going to get better. I'm not sure there's an answer for quick success. Like I say, I don't believe in magic. We're not going to go from where we are now to the Atlanta Braves quickly.''
Any progress, though, is bound to carry Apodaca's touch at least as much as Valentine's. People close to the Mets say Apodaca has already made a tighter connection with the players, where the relationship with Valentine is more wait and see.
The proof is in the results, too. The Mets' relievers continued to languish through September, but starter Paul Wilson in particular reversed his disappointing rookie year after Apodaca arrived - nearly 20 years after he threw his last pitch for the Mets.
``It took me all that time to get prepared for this,'' says Apodaca, a minor league pitching coach for the Mets since 1981, including the last six seasons with the Tides. ``It was a hell of a lot easier for me to get here as a player than a coach.
``As a pitching coach, you're not going to make it just on merit, on your ability. You have to have a lightning rod for you, and Bobby was my lightning rod.''
The electricity, of course, has barely registered at Shea for some time now, which is why Valentine and Apodaca are there. The Yankees are New York's excitement, the sweethearts of the media and masses.
Once the team of Valentine's Connecticut youth, the Yankees are less his rivals now than his partners. They are pulling all the weight at the moment, but Valentine, who played and coached for the Mets, knows the city is plenty big enough for them both. And more than ready for some shared lightning.
``The Yankees are always going to be who they are, and we're always going to be who we are,'' Valentine says. ``The goal is to have us both be as good as we can be. If we can both be real good at the same time, then there's magic.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
An older, wiser Bobby Valentine doesn't expect quick fixes with the
Mets. by CNB