Prologue

I just ended Mr. Baseball’s career.

The boy was roughhousing with his friends as boys do and it was all fun and games until he landed a shot to his friend’s eye. The boy’s heart sank because his friend wasn’t just any teenager. His friend was Bobby Valentine and in Stamford, Connecticut, Bobby Valentine was everything.

The Stamford of the 1960s was beginning its transition from working class burg of factories and docks into leafy bedroom community of glittering corporate outposts. The industrial waterfront would soon be replaced by a series of glass towers, each new one a carbon copy of the last. Those who remembered Stamford’s lunchpail past could feel there was no room for them in this new version of their hometown. They didn’t have much to hold onto, but they did have Bobby Valentine, world-class competitor.

Valentine’s skill as a running back garnered comparisons to O.J. Simpson from the man who’d coached Simpson at USC. He was so good at basketball that for years after he’d left local coaches could chide a showboating youngster by yelling, Who do you think you are, Bobby Valentine? He excelled at more esoteric endeavors too, winning pancake eating contests and ballroom dancing competitions. (The men paid to cover him would have a field day with that little biographic detail.) If an event ended with crowning a winner he’d find some way to be that winner. But baseball was his true love. All the lights outside his house were covered in baseball-shaped globes, painted by a carpenter father who thought he could no wrong.[i]

All of Stamford agreed with his father. Bobby Valentine was son to them all, a local treasure to be cherished and protected. That’s why a boy could nail Bobby Valentine with an accidental elbow to the eye and have his first fear not be a retaliatory blow, but the fear that he’d destroyed the hope of an entire town.

But Bobby Valentine shrugged off the blow because nothing could stop Bobby Valentine. If your entire hometown called you Mr. Baseball before you could vote or buy a beer or join the army, you’d probably believe it, too. The problems would only come when you left that town and entered a world that didn’t see you glowing with the same angelic light. That world might never make any sense to you at all, and you might never make any sense to that world.

[i] S.L. Price, “Valentine’s Day,” Sports Illustrated, October 11, 1999, http://www.si.com/vault/1999/10/11/267828/valentines-day-his-legion-of-critics-reveled-in-his-late-season-misery-but-mets-manager-bobby-valentine-playoff-bound-had-the-last-laugh.