Possibly a record for the number of negatives in five words. It translates to “Not not fairly, I do not think.” It’s easy to lose track, but I think Craig doubled back once too often and ended up saying it really wasn’t fair to call it a meltdown.

I hate to say it, but I feel like this is an example of groupthink.

It’s like it no longer matters which facts are true or not. A consensus of baseball pundits and fans have determined that Valentine is a vindictive a-hole who can’t manage his way out of a paper bag and if you don’t agree with those sentiments, you’re either dumb or there must be something wrong with you.

I have thought all along he was a bad fit for this market and for this team . . . but not because of his baseball acumen, which I believe to be exceptional, but rather, because you need to be able filter the message like Francona . . . and very few can do that as effectively as he did.

So his inability to interface with the media effectively has now morphed into this notion that he is a terrible manager which in and of itself is absurd.

I’ve been pretty neutral on Valentine all season, but the dumping on him – particularly by the media – has reached bizarro levels. And really, who can blame the guy for lashing out a little bit and defend himself against the constant reporting of his real or perceived flaws?

On a smaller level, some of the most vocal Valentine critics here on HBT have used creative license with their anti-Bobby rhetoric taking it to purely fictitious levels.

The thing is, I don’t know Bobby Valentine, but I did have the opportunity to speak with him a couple of times, and I grew up along the CT coast not to far from Stamford and witnessed plenty of the good that Bobby has done for charity and the community and I know people who have worked with him and alongside of him – in baseball and out.

Bobby isn’t the most eloquent public speaker. Awkward, even. I think that’s pretty obvious to everyone. But he doesn’t speak that way because he’s self-centered . . . he speaks that way because he is an old-fashioned kind of guy who is a bit of a square. When he attempts to sound cool, it just doesn’t come out right.

I’ve never known anyone who knows him personally to say anything bad about the guy. That’s why as much as I loved Youkilis’ intensity on the field, I believe that whatever the issues were between him and Valentine – were far more driven by Youk’s abrasive nature than anything that Valentine said – publicly or not.

Anyway, I’ve typed way more than my fair share about this. Thanks again.

And when I feel the urge to dump on someone based on what I know of a person based solely on media reports, I’m gonna check myself more carefully before I do.

Thanks, kaline. I missed that one.

Did you hear him laying any blame on John Henry or Larry Lucchino or Tom Werner or Ben Cherington?

Yeah, he said he would have preferred to have a little more insight into some of the issues surrounding the club before he took the job. BIG DEAL.

A person who has an 8 AM job, who one morning wants to pick up a relative at the airport, who then arrives at the airport to discover the flight is delayed, then gets stuck in heavy traffic on the way back, calls work to inform them and ultimately arrives two hours late – don’t typically have newspaper reporters making assumptions about the reasons for being ‘late’ and then publishing those assumptions as fact.

There were more legit items for an anti-Bobby type to go after than that. Bobby had a right to be pissed off.

It isn’t that Valentine is mostly at fault, it is that he is 0% of the solution.

Typical conservative. Illiterate.