Bobby Valentine Says Kevin Youkilis Not ‘As Into The Game’

For that, here’s Jason Turbow (via SI.com):

Over the course of a season, though? We don’t really know how a manager affects the performance of his players and we probably never will. But we sure do spend a lot of time guessing. We guess that Tony La Russa and Bobby Cox were doing something that made their players better. Not a lot better. Just slightly better, enough that over the course of a season, La Russa and Cox might have wrung an extra win or three out of their teams.

There’s a scene in The Hunt for Red October -- the sixth-greatest submarine movie ever, by the way -- when Fred Thompson’s character says, “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”

I love that line so much, even though it’s delivered with a bit more gravitas than it probably deserves, that I’ve used it at least once in the midst of a baseball column. Which gives it even more gravitas than it deserves. Since nobody ever dies in baseball.

This might be the most Bobby Valentine quote ever released into the wild:

I was just trying to smooth it over. I guess I didn’t.

Youkilis responded to the comments through Tim Britton of the Providence Journal:

”I don’t know. That’s not what I see. I go out every day and play as hard as I can -- take every ground ball in the morning, take every at-bat like it’s my last. I don’t think my game has changed at all. I still get upset with myself. I still get mad. That’s just not how I go about the game of baseball.“Youkilis also reveals that the comments to the media marked the first time he heard Valentine’s opinion, and that the subject of being “into the game” wasn’t something with which his manager had approached him.

“I don’t think he’s as physically or emotionally into the game as he has been in the past for some reason. But [on Saturday] it seemed, you know, he’s seeing the ball well, got those two walks, got his on-base percentage up higher than his batting average, which is always a good thing, and he’ll move on from there.”

It’s not the performance that is going to get the Boston writers going, though. It’s this part of the quote, which bears repeating: