David Lennon: Celebrating Bobby Valentine's legacy of leadership and journey to Mets' Hall of Fame

The Subway Series always was the perfect stage for Bobby Valentine. His job title was Mets manager, but he is a showman at heart. Few who called Flushing home were able to surf the franchise’s turbulence quite like Valentine, who usually emerged from another crashing wave with that giddy ear-to-ear grin, wiping the chaos from his brow with renewed gusto.

On May 30, Valentine will be inducted into the Mets’ Hall of Fame alongside former teammate Lee Mazzilli and the Cooperstown-bound Carlos Beltran, who remains an adviser to the current club.

Valentine’s on-field resume puts him among the Mets’ greatest achievers, as his 536 wins rank third behind Davey Johnson (595) and Terry Collins (551). He snapped an 11-year postseason drought by leading the Mets to the playoffs in 1999 and followed it up with a World Series trip in 2000. He became the first manager to get the franchise to back-to-back postseason appearances (Collins did the same in 2015-16).

To appreciate that degree of difficulty, consider the Mets have made the playoffs only 11 times in their history, with five World Series appearances and two championships, the last one coming in 1986. But Valentine’s Flushing legacy goes well beyond his ballpark exploits. It extends to the greater New York region, as many remember his herculean efforts to help the city heal after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The Mets did everything they could to help in the face of such unimaginable grief and incalculable loss. When the Twin Towers fell, the Mets were in Pittsburgh, but as they scrambled to get their own bearings — like the rest of the wounded nation — the focus quickly shifted to the needs of a badly broken city, both physically and emotionally.

Naturally, Valentine — who grew up a standout multisport athlete in Stamford, Connecticut — assumed a leadership role, putting aside his manager’s cap to guide the Mets in their work visiting with round-the-clock first responders as well as comforting shattered families.

“Bobby was the general,” said Brooklyn native John Franco, the Mets’ captain. “If there’s somebody you want in a foxhole with you, that’s the guy.”

Franco, who is the club’s all-time saves leader and was inducted into the Mets’ Hall of Fame in 2012, recalled many of the Valentine-led expeditions to Ground Zero along with the relief mission at Shea Stadium, which initially was used as a medical staging center before becoming a citywide distribution hub for donations and supplies.

Valentine had made his name inside Shea, but it was out in the parking lots, amid the mountain ranges of boxes and crates, where he probably left his most enduring impact. He was as relentless while running point for those crucial labors as he was managing games for the Mets, though this was uncharted territory for everyone involved.

“There’s no playbook,” Valentine said. “I remember in some of the lonely moments — in my car, the only time I think I was ever really alone, talking to family and friends — thinking what do we do? What are we supposed to do? And there was no one who had the definitive answer.”

Yet Valentine — almost instinctively, as a good manager does — was able to act as a compass during those impossible days and weeks for a team and city trying to feel its way out of what seemed like an impenetrable wilderness.

Players mentioned how Valentine stood in the middle of the clubhouse and deftly attempted to plot a course forward, understanding that many of them were struggling with how to process the personal loss themselves.

“Bobby, I give him a ton of credit,” Todd Zeile said. “I think he really seized the moment to give us some sense of purpose in a way, and that was probably very important in the immediate aftermath.

“Because everybody was kind of wondering how life was going to be different. How the world was changing, how New York was changing. Is there going to be baseball for a while? So I think it gave us something to rally around as a team and brought us closer together.”

And when baseball games finally resumed, with the Mets returning to Pittsburgh for the Sept. 17 startup, Valentine sent the team ahead without him. He still had some unfinished business at Shea.

“The thing that I remember most,” Franco said, “is that when we flew back, he stayed to unload trucks and met us the next day. He was a leader, man.”

Said Valentine, “I just felt that it was my responsibility to do as much as I could. I never served [in the military], but it was like a call to duty. That’s what it seemed like at the time, and so I was running round frantically trying to do as much I possibly could do.”

One of Valentine’s more indelible post-9/11 imprints has been on display every Sept. 11 since — the first responder caps first worn by the Mets and later adopted by the Yankees. The idea first surfaced when Zeile exchanged a Mets cap with an NYPD officer at Ground Zero, then wore the hat during some of the first practices at Shea.

That gesture grew into the entire team sporting the first responder caps during the season reopener in Pittsburgh. But after the Mets subsequently put them on for that night’s game, they were informed by the commissioner’s office that it would not be allowed because of uniform regulations. They defied that order, of course, and Valentine staunchly defended their actions.

“Bobby was right there with us — he had our backs,” Franco said. “And we got to wear the hats for the rest of the season. They don’t make ’em like Bobby anymore. We had his back, too.”

That was vintage Valentine, whose actions often exemplified the motto “better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” Whether it ranged from the amusing stunt of donning an eye-black mustache and glasses for a post-ejection dugout return or something as meaningful as the first responder caps, Valentine did what he believed was the right thing regardless of the fallout.

It was a Valentine trademark, and it happened to inspire a remarkable series of events for the Quackenbush family, whom Valentine got to know before 9/11 and helped navigate the trauma afterward, specifically the loss of his friend Chris, who worked for an investment firm on the 104th floor of 2 World Trade Center.

That summer, as part of a golf outing fundraiser, Valentine auctioned off the chance to be a batboy for his National League team at the July All-Star Game in Seattle. He never checked with anyone at MLB to sign off on such a priceless opportunity — Valentine said the idea came to him in the middle of the auction — but Chris Quackenbush won the bidding.

So Chris, son C.J. and daughter Whitney traveled with Valentine to Seattle, where they hung around with him, had lunch with Dodgers legend Tommy Lasorda and hobnobbed with the All-Stars at then-Safeco Field during the Midsummer Classic festivities.

“I was a huge Mets fan,” said C.J., who now is 34 and works in guest experiences for the team. “I would go home, get my homework done and watch every Mets game because that’s just what we did.

“I knew how cool it was, but looking back, I didn’t realize how spoiled I was to have that opportunity. I remember constantly asking [Valentine] questions about every player on the team, and strategy, because I was an 8-year-old kid who’s playing Little League and starting to understand the game a little bit.”

It was a dream trip but also turned out to be the last game Chris and his children spent together. Two months and a day later, the Twin Towers were attacked, and Chris was gone.

In the weeks that followed, Valentine kept involved with the search, but Chris’ remains weren’t discovered for another year, and the focus then turned to a farewell.

Chris’ sister, Gail, immediately knew what her brother would want because he already had told people. The Quackenbush family is full of multigenerational Mets fans, and the previous October, at the Subway World Series, Chris had sprinkled his mother’s ashes along the third-base line at Shea. Now Gail was hoping to do the same for Chris, but she obviously needed some help.

Enter Valentine. The Mets prohibit the practice, but because Valentine is a boundary-pusher (or simply steps over the line when necessary), he graciously accepted the request from the Quackenbush family.

So Gail — who was sitting in her brother’s former seats — passed the vial to Valentine and watched him spread the ashes.

“I actually asked the Mets for permission,” Valentine recalled, “and they said no.”

Obviously, that wasn’t going to stop Valentine, who made his mark with the Mets by being an irrepressible force for the good of his team and the city, both on and off the field.

By David Lennon

dave.lennon@newsday.comDPLennon

David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.