Tuesday's newspaper column comes in three pieces, one about "The Zen of Bobby V" on ESPN2 Tuesday night, one about Terrell Owens' guest appearance on "Under One Roof" Wednesday night and one about how Cablevision's pending takeover of Newsday might (or might not) affect coverage of the Knicks, Rangers and MSG.
Former Newsday baseball writer Larry Rocca makes a guest appearance in the Bobby V portion of the column. He's an interesting dude in his own right, and one of WatchDog's most loyal readers in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Click below for more on him and his thoughts on Bobby V and the filmmakers behind the ESPN2 show Tuesday night.
Rocca covered the Mets for the Star-Ledger of Newark in 1997 and '98, then the Yankees for Newsday through early 2001, then the Mets for the Star-Ledger again in 2001.
He was the Ledger's baseball columnist from 2002-04 before quitting and accepting a job with Valentine's Chiba Lotte Marines. His father had just died and he had broken up with his fiancee, so it was a good time for a change.
Rocca recalled an informal offer from Valentine to work for/with him and called looking for something to do in Japan.
Rocca's father, Marcel Xavier (Jack) Rocca, who in 1960 founded the Institute of Modern Languages of Washington, D.C., had been stationed in Japan during the Korean War and spoke Japanese fluently. His son long had an interest in Japanese baseball and wrote extensively about Hideo Nomo in 1995, which led to freelancing for Japanese newspapers and magazines and co-writing a book about Nomo.
He first visited Japan in 1995, where he reunited with a childhood friend and his family who then were living in the country. When he saw his friend's father at Game 1 of the Nippon Series, he was sitting with the father of Ichiro Suzuki.
Rocca's interest in Japanese baseball helped him bond with Valentine in New York.
On Oct. 28, 2004, Marcel died. The funeral was Nov. 1. Rocca broke up with his girlfriend Nov. 6. He called Valentine Nov. 8.
"Ten days later I was flying here on business class on an $8,000 plane ticket for a job interview,'' he said.
Three-and-a-half years later, how is his Japanese? "It's OK, very limited," he said. "It's good for restaurants, taxis and certain singles bars."
Rocca worked closely with the three NYU film students who spent eight months with Valentine last season.
"They're really great guys; I was around them all the time,'' he said. "Every time they went to a stadium for the first time I accompanied them. Any dealings with the front office they alluded to, that was me. Dinner, lunch, beers. I really like the guys.
"I was wary when I saw these really young guys who wanted to do this thing and I wondered if Bobby was going to get burned somehow. Three guys from NYU film school. What are the odds that one of them is not a complete ----? But they were like the three greatest guys of all time. It’s just impossible to exaggerate what good guys they were.
"I’m 41 now. I was really proud to see three young American guys come over and do what they did. They're the kind of guys I would have been best friends with in college. Just great guys."
Rocca said Valentine tried to help whenever he could, granting access, suggesting angles and shots. "He was really interested in getting as much of our world exposed to the U.S. audience as possible,'' Rocca said. "He viewed it as National Geographic finding this lost world in the jungle."
Rocca said before Valentine arrived in 2004, the Marines were "a complete joke of a franchise . . . He took the Tampa Bay Devil Rays of Japan and has turned them into, not the Yankees or Red Sox or Cubs, but turned them into, say, the Angels."
More Rocca trivia: His high school teammate and co-captain at Georgetown Prep near Washington, D.C., in 1985 was one Brian Cashman, a future baseball executive of some note.
When Rocca and Cashman lost their last game to St. Albans, the final out was recorded by freshman second baseman and future Diamondbacks GM Josh Byrnes.