Murray Chass On Baseball: Bobby Valentine: ADVERTISEMENT FOR HIMSELF

Thank heavens the newspaper biz folded like Al Jaffee making paper airplanes ...or else we wouldn’t have boss non-blogshiving like this.

There was one more element to Valentine’s paranoia where I was concerned. At the time, he was engaged in a long-running, nasty feud with another reporter, Marty Noble of Newsday. Knowing that Noble and I were friends, Valentine decided that whatever I wrote that he viewed as being negative about him was in support of Noble.

He told others that I was Noble’s hit man. To me, he said I was doing Noble’s dirty work. Neither was true, but he refused to understand. Why would a reporter from one newspaper want a reporter from another newspaper writing a story that the first reporter and newspaper didn’t have. It did have the second story, but why didn’t that make that reporter the hit man?

It was all so silly, but that was the self-made muck Valentine wallowed in. The passage of four years did nothing to extricate him from it.

In January 2003 my nephew was traveling with a friend, and they encountered Valentine in the workout facility of a Las Vegas hotel. The friend, who knew Valentine, introduced my nephew to him as “Murray Chass’ nephew.”

“He’s a despicable human being,” Valentine barked.

Since then, Valentine has gone to Japan and cleansed himself, and he is ready to return and lead Team USA to triumph over two-time Classic winner Japan. I know that because I read it in Valentine’s advertisement in the Sunday Times.