While his team continues to nosedive and rumors circulate about his future, Bobby Valentine remains combative, as evidenced this afternoon in a defiant, semi-crazed sounding segment on The Big Show.
Here’s the transcript from WEEI.com, but you need to hear it to get the full effect. (You can also download it as an MP3.)
This is the part that will get the most attention:
Ordway: Let’s get it on the table. People back here are talking an awful lot about you, ummm, I understand they make a huge deal, they change the personnel on your team dramatically, a team that is much more challenged to score runs, but you do get the impression that maybe you’ve kind of checked out. Have you checked out of this?
Valentine: What an embarrassing thing to say. You know if I was there, I’d punch you right in the mouth. Haha. How’s that sound? Sound like I checked out? What an embarrassing thing to…why would someone even, I mean, that’s something that a comic strip person would write.
The desire to punch a WEEI host isn’t necessarily an unreasonable nor unnatural one, but expressing it on the air is not the wisest course of action. A PR-conscious ownership isn’t likely to react charitably to this interview.
Later, Ordway rats out Nick Cafardo as a reporter that wrote that Valentine was “late” for a game (arriving at 4:00 for a 7:00 game.)
Did he really? That’s really embarrassing, Nick. I’ll see him when I get out there. He could have asked me very easily.
Poor Nick. He’s been carrying Bobby V’s water the entire season, and this is how he is rewarded in the end? (He wasn’t even being judgmental in bringing up the “late” incident.)
The media sessions in Seattle tonight should be interesting, to say the least.
I’m no Bobby V guy, to be sure, but the glee with which this meltdown and the meltdown of his team is being met with is slightly nauseating to me. I may have hated the decision to hire him in the first place, but this is a man’s life we’re talking about here, and his career, and we’re seeing it end with a fiery crash. There’s nothing enjoyable about that.
