It's propaganda to try to generate interest in an inferior team with no exciting players. Valentine was a problem last year, but he was not the reason for Bard sucking. That was Bard's doing. Bobby V could see early on in Spring Training that Bard was not up to the task and he offered him a way out. He asked him flat out if he was up to it and whether he wanted to pursue being a starter. Bard should have taken that as a sign that a veteran talent evaluator like Valentine didn't think he had it, and he didn't have it. It became more clear with each outing. The kid stubbornly insisted that he could do the job, and he s*** all over himself. Cherries was committed to the experiment, and Bobby V had just had his balls cut off over his comments about Youkilis, so he was not in a position to pull the plug on the experiment unilaterally. I still feel believe that he left Bard in that game against Toronto to s*** all over himself so badly that the team had to send him to the minors out of sheer humiliation. If you remember, Bard just thought he needed to straighten out a few things before his next start. The kid was clueless. He couldn't find anything for the next 3 months in the Bullpen in AAA and then back in Boston.