FAITH HEALER
TERRY’S MESSAGE TO METS: EVERYONE RELAX
NO PANIC. Just patience and a plan. That is the message Terry Collins has given his slumping Mets, man to man, manager to team. “I told these guys, I know where we are sitting,’’ Collins told The Post before Tuesday night’s game against the Braves at Citi Field was postponed by rain. “We got a long way to go. We put one streak together we are right back in this. That’s the message.’’ Collins believes in his team more than you can imagine, even after an 8-11 start and a sweep by the Nationals at Citi Field, posting a home record of 4-8 this cold April. “He instills confidence in us,’’ second baseman Neil Walker said of Collins. “Really, with how things went last year with injuries and everything, he never panicked. Players can tell when a manager panics. We never sensed that last year in him and we haven’t sensed that this year.’’ “You look at this team, what they did last year, guess what, you’ve got to do it again,’’ Collins said of the Mets’ ability to overcome a slew of injuries in 2016 to make it to the postseason. “That’s big league baseball. The Yankees got off to a slow start and now they went on a run. As good as the Nationals are, as good as the Cubs are, the Cubs won a World Series, they came in here and lost four straight last year, they got knocked around pretty good. “There is going to be a time when they lose six out of eight, it’s just the nature of the game. “It’s not that you are not trying. Hey look, you run into a team that’s hot, you get beat sometimes. It’s a tough time, but we will get through it,’’ Collins said. Collins is hoping the Mets are through the worst of it. Yoenis Cespedes (hamstring) and Travis d’Arnaud (hand) said they are both ready to play. Collins is a veteran manager and he has a veteran team. He knows what buttons need to be pushed. “With the guys that aare in that clubhouse, youy can’t show panic,’’ CCollins said. “They are winners. They have been there before. They’ve slumped before and they’ve all bbeen through this. “Now you gotta have ssome patience. Now when it starts to warm up I think we can ana- lyze things a little bit better. But we have played under some tough circumstances, the other team has to play under the same conditions, but we are a different team than a lot of teams. We are a fly ball team and we are not a team that is going to steal bases and create runs. We are going to live and die with some damage we could do — we’ve hit some balls that should have been out.
“But we’re not making excuses, we’re not hitting and the biggest thing is we are not getting on base,’’ he said of the team’s abysmal on-base percentage (.288). Consider that Curtis Granderson owned a .335 on-base percentage in 2016 and is now at .205.
“You can go back to a year ago when people were saying Grandy is not hitting, but he still had a [.335] on-base percentage because he walked, and that’s what gets us because that’s what made us a successful team, our on-base,’’ Collins said. “We walked, and we hit home runs.’’
Like eight other major league managers, Collins is in the final year of his contract, but is not thinking about that at all.
“I’m not worried about anything [contractually],’’ he said. “I try to do the best I can. Try to get the team ready to play and try to get them up and try to have some fun so it’s not ‘woe is us.’ ’’
Earlier, Collins talked about the reality of the early season versus the dreams of spring training.
“Certainly when going into spring training when everybody is healthy it’s pretty easy,’’ he said. “You say, well, we’ve got depth. We’ve got depth in our pitching and we got depth in our lineup and before the leaves are on the trees you are down two starting pitchers, and four position players. So now you’ve got to really say we talked about protecting these guys, but we’re faced with a little different situation. Now we got to push some of these starting pitchers, they’ve got to get us deep into the game because that’s the strength.’’
Pushing the starting pitchers should make the Mets better.
“On the other side it’s about still staying patient with the hitters because we know it’s going to come, there are track records,’’ Collins said. “Yes, we realize every season is different. It’s part of this job to be able to adapt and come up with an idea that works. Making sure you are moving the players all around. We went on that last road trip bound and determined to give everybody a day off and two of them got hurt. There are those times where nothing you do works and that’s tough, that’s just personal frustration more than anything else and you realize that happens to everybody.’’
It has happened to the Mets once again. It’s time to rise above.