This past week was not a particularly stellar one for Terry Collins—although, to be fair, his truly bad stretches as a manager have historically involved some kind of player uprising, so his bar might look unreasonably high. Nonetheless, it was a pretty putrid string of recent days by almost measure. To wit:
On Wednesday, he publicly belittled longtime Mets P.R. director Jay Horwitz after Horwitz pressed him to explain to reporters why Syndergaard was pulled from the game earlier than expected. “There wasn’t any questions on it,” Collins briefly retorted before explaining that Horwitz—“the puppy dog,” in his words—insisted he update the media regarding Syndergaard’s health.
On Thursday, he apologized for making those comments. “I was out of line for saying what I said at the press conference,” Collins said. “He was just doing his job, and I wasn’t doing mine.” He also discussed his frustration with always having to talk about player injuries: “I’d like to enjoy a victory one time for more than five minutes.” Aside from the weirdness of bolting after giving an injury update related to your best pitcher, the idea of laying into Horwitz is like dressing down your accountant for coming up one deduction short. It’s unseemly and simply isn’t necessary.
On Friday, he sounded downright giddy at the prospect of having Jose Reyes on the major league roster, a full day before the Rockies officially released him and the Mets, in fact, signed him to a minor-league deal. Reyes was a batting champ and Collins’ best player in his first season as Mets manager in 2011. That was also Reyes’ last season in Queens. Now, having served a massive suspension for, according to police, choke-slamming his wife into a glass door, he is again under contract by the Mets and will likely be back at Citi Field in a matter of weeks, if that. (He’s already been promoted to Double-A Binghamton.)
On Saturday, he talked about his direct role in getting Michael Conforto demoted to Triple-A Las Vegas. “He came off the field and I was just looking at him, and I could just see that he had reached the state of mental confusion,” Collins said. “I just want him to go get some confidence and get back here.” Back in mid-April, I wrote how Conforto had clearly earned the chance to be an everyday player and not be platooned out against left-handers. As Joe Sheehan ably pointed out in his newsletter this weekend, Collins never did give the young left fielder that opportunity and probably contributed to his precipitous slide out of the show.
After the game that night, Collins publicly ripped backup outfielder Alejandro De Aza for a lack of hustle on a botched bunt attempt. On the season, De Aza now has a .170 TAv and an OPS+ of 28. Not three weeks ago, Collins praised De Aza—”this guy is a good player”—and pledged to find him more time in the lineup. Since that day, De Aza has played in 15 games (starting six) and is 2-for-30 at the plate.
The Jose Reyes mess is its own entire debacle on which Bryan wrote at length last week, and I largely agree with what his thoughts. Even taking every conceivable baseball reason out of the equation—all of which are secondary, by a wide margin—there are myriad human reasons why the Mets should not have signed Reyes and it’s sickening that they feel such a duty to give him another chance at the privilege of playing baseball. He’s already been cheered, a mere one game into his comeback, and I’m sure my irritation over the situation has only just begun.
But Collins’ excitement at getting Reyes back could barely be contained, and it wasn’t a very good look. It reminded me of the worst parts of the past 25 years, when the team would put aside character and integrity and sign players purely because they thought someone could help them win games. (To that end, rarely did it ever work out, usually resulting in some kind of incident or further embarrassment.) I should be stunned when teams now approach batterers as some kind of new market inefficiency, but I am, even as it invariably reminds me of Mets teams I’ve tried for years to forget about, with the infighting and tone-deaf decisions and so forth.
The fact is, ever since the World Series, Collins has had a rough go, not just with on-field decisions but, as I’ve documented, the off-field aspects as well. And although he’s the oldest manager in MLB, this is not an ageist argument. Plenty of baseball managers older than Collins have found continued success. Maybe it’s just the extra attention. Maybe it’s dealing with management such as the Wilpons, although one would hope Sandy Alderson would act as more of a filter from all that badness. Maybe it was nothing more than one really bad week. We all have those!
I don’t know the reasons for Collins’ crankiness and misguided statements, and just as he shouldn’t soul-search Conforto, I’m not going to play amateur psychologist with Collins. But it’s a thing with him and it’s been a thing for a while now and it’s the kind of thing I hoped the organization had left behind years ago. Maybe the season will right itself before long—and Collins with it—but I’ve seen this movie before and I don’t care for the ending. And all I really know for sure is that Collins, with his actions and words, is making this season worse than it needs to be.
On the bright side, Collins was able to acknowledge Steven Matz’s gimpy elbow on Monday without resorting to insults, so maybe he’s making some progress there.
Photo Credit: Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports
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