Nearly 60 years ago, Lou Lamoriello recruited Bobby Valentine to play on his baseball team. They remain friends to this day.
Lou Lamoriello as Islanders president/GM in 2023, and Bobby Valentine as Mets manager in 1997 Credit: Getty Images
Lou Lamoriello was tipped off to the greatness of Bobby Valentine as an athlete. So the former Islanders president and general manager recruited the just-turned 17-year-old, three-sport high school star in Stamford, Connecticut, to join the team he was managing in the Cape Cod Baseball League — which mostly featured college-age players — in 1967.
But Lamoriello, seven years Valentine's senior, also took the measure of the young man, and their summer together forged a lifelong friendship. It’s why Lamoriello will be among the family and friends in attendance on Saturday at Citi Field as Valentine is inducted into the Mets’ Hall of Fame along with Lee Mazzilli and Carlos Beltran.
“I really loved his enthusiasm, the life [in him],” Lamoriello told Newsday in a phone conversation this week. “You saw that in the way he managed and when he played.
“He’s outgoing. Just his personality gets attention and can draw a crowd.”
Valentine told Newsday that Lamoriello was one of two people he called for counsel before taking the job as Boston Red Sox manager in 2012. Lamoriello was one of his first calls after being fired by the Texas Rangers in 1992. He sought Lamoriello’s advice when he was the Sacred Heart athletic director from 2013-21 and the Connecticut university was constructing an arena.
“It was only a couple-of-months event for me,” Valentine said this week in a separate phone conversation, referring to playing for Lamoriello. “But it was a family affair because he cared about us. He had no reason to care about me other than he showed up one day in Stamford, Connecticut, and asked my folks if I could come and play for him in Cape Cod.
“It’s hard to say, 60 years ago, what tattoo, what brand he put on me other than it was lasting. It showed me that you could be the leader of crazy college kids and the way that they will follow you is if you show them you care.”
Providence assistant basketball coach Bill O’Connor scouted Valentine and recommended him to Lamoriello for his Yarmouth team. Despite his youth, Valentine batted .294 and led the CCBL with 31 runs scored. That led to the Los Angeles Dodgers drafting him fifth overall in 1968, one pick after the Yankees took Thurman Munson, who was named the CCBL MVP in 1967 after hitting .420 for Chatham.
Valentine went on to play 10 seasons for five teams, including 111 games for the Mets from 1977-78 after he was acquired from the Padres at the trade deadline as part of the “Midnight Massacre” deals in which Tom Seaver was dealt to the Reds. But a horrific leg fracture in 1973 robbed him of his speed.
“It’s really unfortunate that he had the injury that he had,” Lamoriello said.
Valentine also managed for 16 seasons, including a 536-467 record in seven seasons with the Mets from 1996-2002 that included a playoff appearance in 1999 and a five-game loss to the Yankees in the 2000 World Series.
Valentine also was lauded for his leadership role in the recovery and emotional healing from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
“It didn’t surprise me,” Lamoriello said. “That’s his personality. Maybe a lot of us would think to do some things and don’t have the gumption to do it. [He did it] for all the right reasons, not the attention reasons.”
Valentine listed Lamoriello along with former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda and Giants Hall of Famer Andy Robustelli, who was from Stamford and was O’Connor’s father-in-law, as among the most influential in his life.
“To be disciplined in that environment was very difficult,” Valentine said of the CCBL. “It’s college kids. It’s Cape Cod. It’s summer. It’s 1967. That [Lamoriello] cared more about the person and making sure that guys were safe and that they were doing the right thing and that they were having fun. He didn’t mind. He understood a little fun. He was a young guy himself. But he was learning how to be a coach and how to be that giving person.
“He wasn’t following anyone around. He wasn’t going around doing bed checks.”
Valentine recounted one of his youthful misadventures in his 2021 autobiography “Valentine’s Way: My Adventurous Life and Times.” So Lamoriello felt free to give his side of that day.
“Recently, we were on the phone and I kidded him about it,” Lamoriello said.
“Because he was 17 and the players there were all college players and certainly my commitment to his family was to make sure he was OK. True story, I was at the laundromat just standing outside. Evidently he was going somewhere with a group of the ballplayers and rather than him wanting me to see him with the players, figuring they were maybe up to no good, they pulled over just before the laundromat and he jumped in the trunk of the car so I couldn’t see him when they passed by.”
Nearly six decades later, Valentine was asked if he could have imagined in 1967 maintaining this friendship with Lamoriello.
“I’m surprised now,” Valentine said. “Was I surprised during the years? Probably, yeah. He became hockey-centric and I became baseball-centric.”
Andrew Gross joined Newsday in 2018 to cover the Islanders. He began reporting on the NHL in 2003 and has previously covered the Rangers and Devils. Other assignments have included the Jets, St. John’s and MLB.
