Gammons: Valentine’s passion for baseball still burns brightly

Tsk-tsk, MLB.com editors…you left out the word bridges.

During the event in Salem, he was asked about the past and the potential of a future that would include managing, and Valentine essentially danced around the answers. “The most important thing is that nothing has really changed,” he told the audience. “I try to be involved in a lot of activities in a lot of areas; for instance, one company I own began delivering water on the Jersey Shore this morning. I don’t know what lies ahead, just that I wake up every morning believing this will be the best day of my life. That keeps me going.”

Valentine hasn’t spent much time dwelling on the Red Sox’s 93-loss season. His comment about David Ortiz “quitting” has passed without further comment from Ortiz. He makes veiled references to Kelly Shoppach’s demand to know when he was going to play, and he clearly feels some members of the media treated him unfairly, especially the references to him being late to the park in Oakland after picking his son up at the San Fransisco airport (he did call in the lineup to coaches from traffic). He clearly feels he took all the heat in the Kevin Youkilis situation, when others believed that when Josh Beckett referred to a “snitch” concerning the beer-and-chicken drama he was pointing the clubhouse finger at Youkilis. “I’m simply not going to comment about certain things,” he told the audience. “But I will say this—no one can question my work ethic and prove it.”

He has remained in Boston, cycling around the city and Charles River almost every day while doing his charitable work, such as for Breslow’s foundation. He watched the news conference for John Farrell. Asked if he wishes he could have been named manager the first week of October last year and had a share of the coaching and organizational hiring processes—instead of the shotgun wedding-style in which he was hired at the end of November—he shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”