The 21-year-old rookie stepped in against Bob Gibson in the eighth inning and stroked a two-out single to right, driving in the winning run.
And you know very well where this story is headed.
“I didn’t play against him again for about a month,” Bobby Valentine says, “and then the first time I came up, he buzzed me. You don’t usually buzz an eighth-place hitter. I got to talk to him years later, and he said he kept a book, and it wasn’t a big book, but people who got game-winning hits against him, that was the calling card.”
A few weeks later, in June 1971, Valentine doubled in the seventh inning to drive in two runs and beat Tom Seaver at Shea Stadium. The all-everything, multisport athlete from Stamford’s Rippowam High got to savor this one — where else? — on “Kiner’s Korner.”
“I don’t remember all that many things in my career, because it was a long time ago,” Valentine says, “but I remember being on Ralph Kiner’s show. That was as cool a thing that’s ever happened to me in my life.”
You know, it doesn’t have to be World Series week. There is never a bad time to talk baseball with Valentine, 70, who played 10 seasons in the majors and managed 16, not counting stints in Japan. No matter how much you think you know, trust me on this, he will give you something new to chew on, things you hadn’t thought about.
This Thursday, Valentine and Joe Torre will be featured in a virtual fundraiser to benefit the new Jackie Robinson Scholarship Fund at Sacred Heart University, where Valentine, the athletic director since 2013, continues to make things happen. The 20th anniversary of the Subway World Series, Torre’s Yankees and Valentine’s Mets in 2000, is the theme. “The last World Series before the world changed,” Valentine says, referring to 9/11. Great conversation is guaranteed.
This has been a brutal year, far beyond baseball, but especially rough on the game’s royalty, with Hall-of-Famers Whitey Ford, Al Kaline, Lou Brock, Joe Morgan, Seaver and Gibson passing. Ford retired in 1967, but Valentine played at one time against all the others. Bobby V. was drafted No. 5 overall by the Dodgers in 1968, first came up in 1969, stuck with LA in ’71 and walked among the legends everywhere he went.
“With the pitchers, with Seaver and Gibson,” he says, “you got to the ballpark and there was an extra excitement. There was going to be the ultimate challenge. They were bigger than life, even before they were in the Hall of Fame. They weren’t just pitchers. They were athletes in a competitive sport within a sport. It was spectacular.”
Valentine, 12th on The Courant’s list of top Connecticut athletes of the 20th century, was playing all over the diamond for the Dodgers, but the original plan was for him to replace base-stealing king Maury Wills at shortstop and at the top of the lineup, so when the Cardinals were the opponent and he wasn’t dodging Gibson’s fastball, Valentine watched Brock, on his way to breaking stolen-base records, carefully.
“There was a lot of interest every time I played against Lou Brock,” he says, “because he was doing this unbelievable feat of stealing 100 bases and sliding feet first, interestingly enough. I always wanted to see the greatness of him.”
Joe Morgan was traded from the Astros to the Reds in 1972, and he took Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine” to the championship level.
“Joe Morgan was the guy that befuddled everyone,” Valentine says, “because he was the smallest guy on the field, but he was a pull hitter, could hit it over the fence and he used the smallest glove of anybody I ever saw. It was so hard to hit the ball out of Houston, so easy to hit it out of Cincinnati; he became himself. He was a small player in Houston; he became a big player in Cincinnati.”
The modern game is losing, missing much of what these players provided. The starting pitcher who commands the stage has been replaced by the “opener,” and a parade of relievers. And the stolen base is not a big part of modern offense, which emphasizes walks and home runs, and is willing to trade strikeouts for them.
“It wasn’t just about the base,” Valentine says. “I felt when I had a guy like Rickey Henderson or an Oddibe McDowell, a real threat on first base, often times I wouldn’t even want him to steal because of the advantage the hitter was getting by distracting the pitcher. If you don’t understand how that plays in the competition between pitcher and hitter, then you discount the value of someone who can steal a base.
“… With the marquee pitchers that sold the tickets, I truly believed that if you didn’t get them early, you didn’t get them at all. They got stronger as the game went on, not because of their velocity, but because of the competition. They had a chance of seeing what a hitter was bringing to the game that day and attacked it. That understanding of the game within the game is lost by many.”
Seaver, Gibson, Brock and Morgan were in their prime in 1971. Keep naming the players active in the National League when Valentine made his first trip around the circuit: Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, Willie McCovey, Ernie Banks, Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Steve Carlton, just a partial list.
“Danny Ozark, the third base coach on the Dodgers, would come in and rustle up the young players during infield practice of the other team,” Valentine remembers, “and make sure we went out on the bench and watched Roberto Clemente throw from the outfield, watched Hank Aaron take batting practice, watch the great ones of our time so we could appreciate and understand how different they were.”
And there was Dick Allen, as feared a slugger as any, who was often in conflict with management, and establishment.
“What it was, it was the first generation of the Black athlete being accepted in major league baseball, totally,” Valentine says. “What Jackie did through the ’50s was now firm. The seed was planted. I was a teammate of [Dick] Allen with the Dodgers and spent a lot of time with him, and he had great perspective on it. He wasn’t quite there. He wasn’t quite accepted because he was different. He would point to Frank Robinson, or Willie McCovey, and say, ‘I’m just a little different than they are. It’s going to take a little longer for them to accept me.’ As a young guy, it gave me great perspective on what I was looking at.”
Turbulent times, then and now. Valentine, who walked in civil rights marches in the 1960s, and was present at protests in Stamford this year, pushed the idea of a scholarship in the name of Jackie Robinson, who lived much of his life in Stamford and received an honorary degree from Sacred Heart in 1972.
“I said, ‘I think the stars are aligned for us to team up with the Robinson Foundation,'” Valentine said. “The university agreed. The Foundation agreed. We’ve already raised a lot of money, and I’m really excited about it.”
All proceeds from the “SHUand42” event will go toward the program, which will provide four-year scholarships to attend Sacred Heart for students chosen by the Robinson Foundation after a national application process. Valentine, Torre and their guests will talk about Jackie Robinson’s everlasting impact, and that magic week in 2000. The Yankees won in five, but the games were close and eventful, most particularly with the Roger Clemens’ bat-throwing incident in Game 2. Bobby V. says he still second-guesses himself for not trying a squeeze bunt that might’ve won Game 1, and relives the last out in Game 5.
“I have a lasting memory of shaking hands with Joe Torre at home plate, and I just wanted time to stop,” Valentine says. “I thought it was just wonderful. And standing in the dugout, thinking we had a chance and Mike Piazza hitting a ball against Mariano Rivera that I was sure was a home run and watching Bernie Williams go back and catch it. It was like, ‘Oh, my,’ and then it was over.”
Dom Amore can be reached at damore@courant.com.
