Bobby Valentine has a prediction for next year, but it doesn’t involve the playoffs or World Series.
The Met manager predicted there would be a card game in the clubhouse on the first day of spring training, which he thought was fine, but he warned he wants no part of being the anti-card police if the games conflict with baseball, as they did in October.
Valentine was at the New York Mercantile Exchange yesterday for charity and to open trading in the crude-oil pit along with Giant linebacker Jessie Armstead, and said he did not think new rules were the way to address things like late-inning card games in critical playoff games.
Instead, personal accountability was the way to go. Rules don’t make for a good clubhouse, good players do, although one of the first things Valentine did when he took the helm in 1997 was outlaw smoking in the clubhouse.
“Rules are only there to establish right from wrong,” he said. “I think people who are representing the Mets next year will know the difference between right and wrong.”
Valentine said he wasn’t speaking of any player in particular, but it was Bobby Bonilla and Rickey Henderson who were involved in a high-stakes game of casino as the Mets were clinging to baseball life in the late innings of Game 6 of the NLCS in Atlanta two months ago.
If you think that means Bonilla will be gone, Valentine told several autograph-seeking fans yesterday he looks forward to having Bonilla back in spring training.
As for the infamous card game, Valentine said he never witnessed it and never spoke to anyone who did, but two players told The Post they saw it, and GM Steve Phillips later confirmed it took place and said he would deal with it in spring training.
“Steve and I will be on the same page with this,” Valentine said. “But I can guarantee I won’t be going back in the clubhouse in the eighth inning to see if guys are playing cards or not during the season, and I don’t like rules that are unenforceable.”
Then Valentine went on to chronicle a problem he had with Bonilla during the season, when he says Bonilla wore an earring against team policy.
“The only rule infraction I’ve ever encountered was the earring that Bobby insisted on wearing last year,” Valentine said.
“I fined him for a while and then wasn’t allowed to fine him anymore. Once I wasn’t allowed to fine him for it, it was handled another way.”
As for the card game itself, which fans saw as an affront to their unyielding devotion and emotional investment they make each year to the team, Valentine said he didn’t share the same outrage as those offended fans.
“Outrage comes with surprise,” he said. “I wasn’t surprised, so I wasn’t outraged.”
In fact, he said it was simply a matter of perspective. When told that a clubhouse source believed the game was worth tens of thousands of dollars, Valentine just shrugged and said maybe there indeed was more at stake in the game than on the field.
“I guess it all depends on how much the game was worth,” he said with a tinge of sarcasm, perhaps aware of the supply-and-demand ethos surrounding him at the Exchange. “Maybe it was worth more to win in a card game than it was to win on the field.”
Bonilla was asked repeatedly about the game last week and refused to either confirm or deny it took place, saying he refused to get into “he said, she said.”