It’s shaping up to be a looooong week at Fenway, what with Kevin Youkilis and Bobby Valentine acting like a couple of angry ex-lovers in the throes of the ugliest hardball divorce since Cynthia caught A-Rod with all those strippers.
The sniping, snubbing, passive-aggressive letter-writing and partisan bickering is almost enough to get us excited over the Red Sox again!
There’s Bobby V telling the world Kevin needs to get over himself. There’s Kevin penning an open letter to Red Sox Nation praising everything about Boston except the new manager. There’s Bobby ignoring Kevin as he took his swings during batting practice last night. There’s Kevin ignoring Bobby as he hugged it out with his former teammates.
But enough wallowing in the drama, the Track is here to help. So we rounded up some relationship experts to get their advice on how the boys can to cope with their week of forced togetherness with a minimum of dysfunction. Hey, if Tom and Katie could pull it off, so can they!
First off, all our experts agreed, the boys need to check the verbal swinging for the sake of the children … or, in this case, the fans.
“In divorces the advice is always this: If you can’t get along, fake it for the kids,” said Dr. Karen Ruskin of Sharon, a psychotherapist and licensed marriage and family therapist. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
Syndicated advice columnist Margo Howard of Cambridge concurred.
“Bobby Valentine should just suck it up and be gracious,” said Howard, who, in case you don’t know, is Ann Landers’ daughter. “As for Kevin, his warm welcome from the fans will speak for him. He doesn’t have to say anything either.”
Radio host Steve Harvey, author of “Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man,” who was in town yesterday to promote his ABC talk show debuting this fall, said now that Youk’s a White Sox, both he and Valentine have got to move on.
“For baseball players, it’s similar to a (romantic) relationship. … The Red Sox didn’t want Youk anymore, the fans may have loved this guy, but his ‘boyfriend’ didn’t want him anymore. He’s gotta deal with that. He’s gotta be a big boy, move on, suck it up. He’s gotta do like he’s done with any other girl he’s broken up with. He’s just gotta walk away.”
Like a spurned hubby who flaunts a new relationship, Youkilis has been tearing it up since changing his Sox, hitting .295 with three home runs, 18 RBIs, and copping player of the week honors.
Dr. Ruskin said that’s not surprising.
“Sometimes a husband will come in and tell me he’s not, ahem, performing well in his marriage but when he’s no longer married he finds he can perform perfectly well in a new relationship,” she said. “He realizes it wasn’t him, it was the chemistry. Ahem. By the way, I don’t have a cough.”
Yeah, we get the picture, Doc …
Ruskin said that once Youkilis and Valentine realize they are better apart than they were together, things should calm down. Or, as Harvey put it, “they gotta erase the past and go forward.”
“They can’t look for closure because men don’t give closure,” he said. “You just gotta move on.”
File Under: Shrinking The Strike Zone
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