BEASTS OF THE EAST!
Baseball lifer Collins finally set for first playoff appearance as a manager
METS WIN DIVISION
CINCINNATI — Maybe this story can give you a little insight into who Terry Collins is, and why he’s still here, 34 years after taking his first manager’s job in Lodi, Calif.
Collins is a baseball lifer, a throughandthrough product of long bus trips and endless summer nights, a player from 197178 who never was quite good enough to get a cup of coffee in the bigs and a manager for three different teams since 1994 whose teams never were quite good enough to make the playioffs.
Until now, with the Mets loitering on the doorstep.
He is also as tough a pug fighter as you will find in the game. There was a time when that didn’t necessarily endear him to his players. There were few tears shed in Houston when he was fired there after three years and three secondplace finishes. There were fewer shed when he was let go from the Angels in the wake of near mutiny.
But Collins persisted. He came back. He managed college kids for a time, and was paid mostly in gas money and Denny’s hamburgers. He went to work for the Mets as an organization man. Then was hired as manager at a time when the Mets brass clearly had winning as a backburner priority.
Yet here he is. On the doorstep.
“I have no problems just worrying about today,” Collins said Saturday, a few hours before the Mets would take on the Reds and take their first crack at clinching the NL East. It is a mantra he has repeated so often that you are at last inclined to believe him. “I think we understand the value of staying in the moment, and the danger in starting to think ahead of yourself.”
He is nothing if not his own man. Years ago, as he was ending a long tenure as the manager of the Dodgers’ TripleA affiliate in Albuquerque, N.M., he even found himself courting conflict with one of the highest profile Dodgers of all. It seems that Collins had noticed quite a few of his prospects go to Los Angeles, experience some early difficulty, and earn a permanent spot on Tommy Lasorda’s bench.
“It’s hard to make it in the big leagues,” Collins said, “when you’re always looking over your shoulder.”
Lasorda wasn’t all that pleased to be getting managerial advice from a guy who had yet to spend even five minutes in The Show as a player or a coach. It would take a few years — first understudying Jim Leyland in Pittsburgh, then running his own show in Houston — but Collins grew to understand that just because you’re tough enough to take on the biggest guy in the room, that doesn’t mean you should.
“So I apologized,” Collins explained a few years ago. “I just walked up to him and said that now I understood more about managing in the big leagues, and I was sorry.” And Lasorda shook his hand. “I always liked Terry personally,” Lasorda said, ending the feud.
These are only segments and fragments of the things Collins brought to the office at Great American Ballpark Saturday. He admitted that for a few minutes after Friday’s 125 win, he allowed himself to sit back, take a long look at where he and his team have been, and where they are, and he allowed himself a satisfactory smile. For a little while anyway. “Then I woke up this morning, I realized we have things in the lineup to address, we have a few issues that need to be taken care of. And it was back to business as usual.”
Back to the only business he’s known for damn near 45 years. Even on the doorstep of his greatest triumph, he wouldn’t take his eyes off the prize. Which probably explains how he got to the doorstep in the first place.