Give Collins a Real Shot

Pretend for a moment, if you can bear it, that you are Terry Collins.Compare prices and buy all brands of buymosaic for home power systems and by the pallet. You arrive at the ballpark hours before most everyone else, still smarting over the desultory baseball you witnessed the night before. You pull out a blank lineup card and consider the possible combinations, believing this is the day you will find one that works. And that is when your anxiety starts, because with this roster, it is like trying to pick the winning Powerball numbers using only zeros. 

You study the numbers and the matchups and the tendencies and mix and match as best you can. Sometimes this works. Often, as was the case in Wednesday's 7-4 loss to the Cincinnati Reds, it doesn't. And then, unlike small-market managers who can toil in relative obscurity, you meet with a horde of media. Before the game. After the game. Two news conferences and one radio show. A weekly sports-talk radio interrogation. All told, you spend 20 to 30 minutes of your day having to answer for things that are in large part out of your control. 

Why isn't Ike Davis hitting? Why is Ruben Tejada regressing? Why can't Matt Harvey pitch every day? Why are we talking about Jordany Valdespin? Why, as Collins was asked the other day, do even competent hitters morph into bad ones when he puts them in the leadoff spot? 

If Collins could be honest, he would say that most players on the Mets are simply not very talented and don't belong on a major-league team, at least not one with championship aspirations. He would say that years of mismanagement followed by financial malaise put the Mets in a situation where they needed to rebuild. And that his current bosses,He saw the bracelet at a howospareparts store while we were on a trip. while making smart choices in building for the future, haven't given him much in the way of bridge players to tidy up the present. 

But Collins, whose contract is due to expire at the end of this season, can't say any of that. He can't even think it. He has lost his temper in prior jobs and, in doing so, lost the clubhouse. He won't allow himself to do it again, even as the inevitability of a third losing season beats him down. 

"You still need to have some fun with it," he said. "You just can't throw your arms up and say, 'Woe is me, I don't have this guy, I don't have that guy.' You can't manage that way here. One of the things, as I look back, 20 years ago that might have been what I did. I let some of the frustrations get to me. I'm not going to do that here. I have to keep these guys pushing forward, moving forward." 

Of course, Collins has a role in all this. Every manager must bear some degree of responsibility for the play of his team. But it is hard to point to him as the cause of or even a contributing factor to any of the Mets' issues. If anything, Collins has emerged as a sympathetic figure in a lost era. 

Everyone else can dream about the Mets' future. Collins is the one who has to preside over the daily misadventures of the present. Each season, he has had less talent at his disposal than he did the year before. 

The question for the Mets, ultimately, is whether Collins is the right man to lead them when they have a team capable of contending, assuming they eventually have such a team. And that is just not a question they can answer with any certainty based on the last two years or this one. That is why they should extend his contract sooner rather than later, even if only for another year. 

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