Bobby Valentine is stepping up again in the face of tragedy

The urge is still there, the impulse to help, to lend a hand, to do something. Back in 2001, that meant Bobby Valentine would try to do whatever was asked of him, go wherever he was needed. The towers had fallen, the city was grieving, and Valentine was managing the Mets, and so he was …

The urge is still there, the impulse to help, to lend a hand, to do something. Back in 2001, that meant Bobby Valentine would try to do whatever was asked of him, go wherever he was needed. The towers had fallen, the city was grieving, and Valentine was managing the Mets, and so he was one of its most recognizable citizens.

“I did what everyone did,” he says. “I wanted to do whatever I could to make people who were hurting feel better.”

Things are different now, almost 19 years later, another crisis having wrapped its bear claws around the city, the country, the world. Back in the awful days following Sept. 11, 2001, the word was clear: Extend a hand wherever you can. Be present. Be there. Shake your neighbor’s hand. Hug perfect strangers.

This? This is something else.

“The call to duty is a little different here,” Valentine says. “After 9/11, the message was ‘Be visible,’ that was the example, be as visible and touch as many people as you can. Now it’s something else: Be as invisible as you can.”

It’s different for Valentine, too. He turns 70 in two weeks. Though he looks and behaves like a man 30 years younger, birth certificates — unlike baseball managers — are undefeated.

“I’m one of the guys people are supposed to worry about,” he says.

But he is also Bobby Valentine. That means spending most of his days fully engaged in his day job as athletic director at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., fretting over and tending to the needs and the immediate futures of 900 student-athletes for whom he’s responsible.

And in Connecticut he is and always will be a favorite son, which means he is always looking to do his fair share. So when former gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski and his wife, Amy, acquired some 800,000 masks, Valentine gladly agreed to join forces with the Masks for Heroes charity to help distribute them throughout Connecticut.

On Sunday, that meant spending an hour handing out baggies filled with five masks to passing motorists in his hometown of Stamford. Tuesday he was in downtown Hartford at the old civic center — now called the XL Center. Friday he hopes to be at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, if his schedule allows.

“It might be challenging unless someone invents a way to Zoom in the car,” he jokes.

“It was a great idea,” Valentine says, “because it has allowed a lot of people who wanted to find a way to be involved to get involved. That’s important to a lot of people.”

Valentine has tried to learn a lesson from the way he was affected long term by the events of 2001, when he crashed into an ennui that so many volunteers did, along the lines of: I’m doing all I can. Why can’t I do more?

And that was during a crisis when everyone knew, early on, that there was a recovery date, different for some than for others. The city reopened a week later. Sports famously returned to the city 10 days later, capped by Mike Piazza’s eternal home run for which Valentine had the best view in the Shea Stadium house.

Life wasn’t the same, necessarily, but it did resume.

“This time, there’s no way of knowing when it will end or how it will end and that’s probably the hardest part,” Valentine says. “The fear and uncertainty are similar to what it felt like after 9/11. I think everyone then and now experienced fear in ways we weren’t able to understand before.”

It helps him to think about present days the way he did when he was managing a ballclub, figuring out the various ways to draw out performance across a long — sometimes seemingly endless — season.

“To win at anything you need trust and teamwork,” he says. “I’m not sure trust has been fully established yet. But I do think there’s teamwork. I know a lot of people who finally say, ‘I just can’t help myself, I need to do something.’ And that’s why the idea of getting these masks to people appeals to me.”

He is still Bobby Valentine, and this is still Connecticut, so he can access as many of those masks as he needs. Sometimes, he simply drops them off at nursing homes or rehab facilities. He knows every little bit helps. He was at a hardware store the other day and saw baggies of five masks going for $15 a pop.

He knows not everyone will — or can — devote that much of shrinking family budgets when there are other essentials to purchase. It is a small bite of an enormous apple. But a worthy one nonetheless.

“I do what I can,” he says. “I think that’s what everyone does.”

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