NEW YORK — Bobby Valentine is too smart to come out and say he covets another shot at the big leagues Mets, Yankees, Dodgers, whatever but given the friction with his current Japanese bosses, you can make book on this: The man is heading home in 2010.

“What I’ve learned from experience is that there’s no way an outsider can win the battle of words here,” Valentine said by telephone recently. That means some general manager inevitably will be tempted by Bobby V’s unique blend of managerial and personality skills — OK, his eccentricities. Who knows, it might even be Omar Minaya.
That is, if Jerry Manuel can’t get the Mets to the postseason, and especially if he can’t eradicate the culture of mental errors that periodically plagues this team.
Once again, the Mets are coming up on one of those stretches that’ll reveal whether they’re more (or less) than the sum of their parts: There’s a three-game series against the Phillies starting a week from Tuesday night, followed by nine games against the AL East, including the Yankees. By the end of the month, the Mets will have a clearer understanding of themselves — and their manager.
How does that relate to Valentine? Only that he remains the most logical response for the Wilpon family if the Mets fail to conquer the Phillies this year. The longer Valentine has been away from Flushing, the kinder history looks upon his reign; it’s clear his firing by Steve Phillips in 2002 was driven solely by personal dislike and not by sound baseball judgment.
Phillips’ acumen largely has been discounted now that he works for ESPN and mindlessly decrees, among other things, that the Mets can’t win with Carlos Beltran. Not that Valentine is gloating or even talking about his former boss. To the contrary, Valentine has his hands full with his present-day employers, the Chibba Lotte Marines, who decided months ago to fire him after this season.
Valentine laughs when he says, “It’s a challenging situation.” All-out war is more like it. Fans loyal to Valentine are protesting, conducting daily vigils to convince Marines’ ownership to bring him back.
Valentine, however, doesn’t expect a thaw.
“I really don’t think they’re going to say, “We made a mistake, we were only kidding,’” Valentine said. “You either appreciate what I’ve done here or you don’t. And they don’t.”
The problem, he says, began when ownership brought in “auxiliary” people who believe that Valentine is overpaid at nearly $4 million a year and the Marines would be better served with a Japanese manager instead of an American.
General manager Tatsuro Hirooka said Valentine is to be let go because he didn’t understand Japanese baseball. That’s the company line. To bolster it, the Marine says Valentine violated protocol by trying to sign a Korean player during the winter meetings — a charge he dismissed as “fraudulent” and “bogus.”
“Look, there’ve been some budgetary constraints and I’m an expensive guy,” Valentine said. “So the new guys (ownership) miscalculated what was going on. They don’t know the energy of the team, what we’ve done here. We’ve had revenues increase dramatically, we’ve had attendance increase. But then some people start to think, ’We could do this on our own. Why do we need a foreigner to do it?’
“They say, ’There’s an old Japanese way to do things, so we revert back.’ But you don’t go back; when you do, you go backwards.”
The underlying irony is that Valentine no longer considers himself an outsider in the Far East. He’d like nothing more than to resolve his differences with the Marines and renew his contract. Fully assimilated, he declares, “I like it enough here to stay.”
Enough to pass on the chance to return to the Mets? Or, perhaps, manage the Dodgers if and when Joe Torre retires after 2009? And what about the ultimate full-circle journey, taking the post-Joe Girardi job and having a chance to finish his career by having managed both New York teams to the World Series?
To all these crazy scenarios, Valentine deftly says thanks, but no thanks. At the very least, he says, he’s not ready to let his imagination start wandering.
“I like my job, I like this team, I like the people here,” Valentine said. “Hopefully I can do it for another 10 years. But where those 10 years will be, that’s someone else’s decision.”
The dialogue goes through third parties now; there are no face-to-face discussions between Valentine and ownership. Unlike the vendetta he and Phillips once had for each other, Valentine is choosing to kill his adversaries with a perfectly neutral public demeanor.
Almost 60, Valentine says he’s learned a lesson about getting angry in the newspapers; it never pays a satisfying dividend. Instead, he says, “I figured out the best way to react is to put on my uniform every day and do the best job I can.
“The fans, they’ve been great. It’s an atypical reaction for the Japanese culture,” Valentine said. “When they’re told to do something, it’s usually, “Yes, sir” especially if it involves a foreigner.”
He laughed at the sheer lunacy of it all, halfway around the world, spending an entire season in lame-duck status. Somehow, though, Valentine must’ve known this day would come, even in Japan. That genetic coding, the one that compels Valentine to somehow irritate his bosses, finally kicked in.
Which isn’t to say Bobby V has burned his final bridge — not by a long shot. The man who says, “I love challenges” still has some winning left in him. Count on that.