RIFT OF GAB!

the Mets led 5-1 early and seemed to be on their way to a laugher, with Robert Gsellman delivering a solid start. He was at 84 pitches after six innings, and Collins probably should have let him at least start the seventh, but it’s not like Gsellman has been dependable this season.

More to the point, Neil Ramirez, picked up on waivers last week, wound up pitching in the crucial spot, relieving Fernando Salas with the bases loaded and giving up a laser off the fence in right-center to Wil Myers to tie the game.

That’s how thin the bullpen is, and as such it gets harder and harder to see this team making a big run to get back into contention. Yet the outlook could change if the Mets get some of their most important players back from injury in the coming weeks.

Which brings us back to the story that won’t go away: the Mets and how they handle injuries.

Since the Noah Syndergaard fiasco, in which the Mets let their star pitcher decline their request that he get an MRI, only to see him suffer a torn lat muscle in his next start, GM Sandy Alderson said he was going to shy away from forecasting timelines for players returning from significant injuries, and, ok, that’s understandable. But now the organization is taking it to an extreme. At Collins’ press conference, the manager didn’t look happy about it, and, in fact, a club source said he was furious about being told what he could and couldn’t say, as it applied to rather routine injury news on both Bruce and Yoenis Cespedes.

According to a source, the manager was especially annoyed that he’d been told earlier in the day not to discuss whether Cespedes would be playing in any minor-league rehab games before returning to Citi Field.

Clearly this is something of an overreaction to the criticism the Mets have received about how they handle injuries. And, to be sure, at times they have been guilty of talking too publicly about when they expected players back from significant injuries — often erring on the optimistic side.

In truth, however, the criticism over the years has stemmed mostly from how various injuries have been treated and diagnosed, the most famous example being the time they put Ryan Church on a cross-country flight after he suffered a concussion.

They’ve also been too slow to put players on the disabled list, hoping injuries would heal quickly, too often leaving themselves playing shorthanded for days at a time only to eventually put the player on the DL anyway.

Recently, Alderson admitted the organization is examining everything related to the handling of injuries, and good for the Mets if they’re willing to look for ways to improve in that area.

However, their biggest fault is that, at times, they’ve simply been guilty of not being open and honest enough publicly about injuries, putting a happy face on matters that only made a later, more serious diagnosis seem bungled.

In any case, it’s not as if Collins has been some loose cannon, spouting opinions against the organization’s wishes. Usually he has simply been as candid as he thought was sensible, figuring the best way to handle injury news was to be upfront about it.

And while he wouldn’t comment on why he had been muzzled, he did tell me he didn’t see a need to overreact to the Mets’ injuries.

“We don’t have any reason to think it’s something we’re doing or not doing that causes injuries,’’ Collins said. “It’s not like we have five guys out with hamstring injuries. If that was the case, I’d say, ‘yeah, we need to take a look at the way we do things.’

“But that’s not the case. And other teams have injuries too, by the way. It’s just the way it is in baseball.” n fact, it’s not the injuries this season that have caused the hysteria. Rather it was allowing Syndergaard to dictate the handling of his biceps soreness, which may or may not have led to the torn lat, and trying to nurse Cespedes through his hamstring injury without a DL stint, only to claim the re-aggravation wasn’t related to the original injury.

Of course, none of that had anything to do with Collins, yet now he’s been told he can’t talk about injuries. Yeah, that should fix everything.

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