Steady as he goes
Collins must be himself to help Mets
WASHINGTON — So many of the little things that bedevil the Mets right now are beyond the purview of their manager — or any manager.
John McGraw could glare at Alejandro De Aza for hours at a time, it wouldn’t turn De Aza from a terrible baseball player to a good one. Joe McCarthy could coax, coddle and cajole Matt Harvey 24 hours a day in between starts; won’t mean Harvey’s going to take a time machine back to 2013. Or even 2015.
Casey Stengel would take one look at this offense, and he would say one of two things: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Or … “If anyone wants me, tell them I’m being embalmed.”
So no: Terry Collins isn’t going to magically snap his fingers and make the offense work. He isn’t going to wave a magic wand and make all the fear and paranoia that accompany every pitch that every one of his young pitchers throws go away.
That won’t happen if he topples a buffet table, either, or if he calls a team meeting before the Mets kick off what could well be a season-defining 10-game homestand starting Thursday at Citi Field. And for the record? Wally Backman doesn’t secretly harbor the keys to that kingdom, either.
But here is what Collins can do now.
He can keep this team from splintering apart. He can keep his players from spiraling even deeper into the various funks that have threatened to derail the season, most recently the 4-2 loss to the Nationals on Wednesday night that finished off a threegame sweep and shoved the Mets six games back in the N.L. East.
Speaking of his team, Collins said, “They’re major league players. If they add pressure to themselves, they’ll continue to struggle. They have to be themselves. If they try to do something they’re not capable of doing, they’re going to struggle.”
It is the perfect bit of commentary coming from Collins because if there’s one lesson he’s learned about himself after 45 years in professional baseball, it is this: If
he tries to be something he’s not, he’s going to struggle, too. He’s going to lose these players. And he’s going to lose this team.
But if we only use last year as a model, we already know that Collins isn’t going to do that. It’s an established piece of Mets history that the 2015 season was forever altered across the last four days in July when the Mets nearly dealt Wilmer Flores and acquired Yoenis Cespedes and the three days at the start of August when they swept the Nats and started their epic two-month sprint.
What is easy to forget is the 2015 Mets were almost exactly the same team as the 2016 Mets, facing almost exactly the same equations at the same point of the season — generally reliable pitching, generally putrid hitting, incapable of putting any extended winning streaks together. And yet they survived. The slogs of June and July featured some grotesquely unwatchable baseball — all of it gruesomely familiar right now.
Yet while the Mets threatened to sink down the rabbit hole, they never did. Collins wouldn’t let them. “When things were at their most depressing,” Curtis Granderson said last October, on the eve of a World Series no Mets fan could possibly have seen coming on the first of July, “it was the manager who kept confident in us, and he was the guy who made sure we still believed in ourselves.”
Collins never is going to be a wildly popular manager, and even as the Mets reached their highest points last year, there was a trail of grumbling about his in-game decisions, right to Game 5 of the World Series when he all but giftwrapped a series of choices Mets fans would be able to discuss right on through Christmas.
If there is one thing good about the Mets’ present struggles, it is this: We know Collins knows how to handle times of crisis. He’s done it. He’s delivered them. This is when his team needs him most. The Mets may not clinch a playoff spot if they can straighten the ship on this monumental homestand. But they can surely prevent themselves from blowing it.
That’s what Collins’ mission is now. It’s a job he’s done well in the past. It’s one he needs to master again — and immediately.