These are the torturous tests you endure sometimes as a manager. We already know how many headaches and how much heartburn the Mets’ bullpen has given Terry Collins — and anyone else with a remote interest in the team’s fortunes. We already knew they have only one left-handed arm, Tim Byrdak’s, in that bullpen.
And we already knew they were playing a man down, since Frank Francisco was placed on the disabled list early last night.
We all know that. And Terry Collins knows that. We can get irrational about managers sometimes, so it’s best to think about them the way you think about commercial airline pilots if you happen to have a fear of flying: The man in the cockpit doesn’t want to crash, either.
Managers aren’t looking to invent ways to lose games.
It just works out that way sometimes.
Last night, after his team had grinded and bloodied its way back from deficits of 4-0 and 5-1 all the way back to 5-5, Collins tried to squeeze an extra inning out of Miguel Batista. Robinson Cano was leading off the eighth. Two nights earlier, Cano had dented the Whitestone Bridge with a rocket blast off Batista. One night earlier, asked why he hadn’t used Byrdak to pitch to Raul Ibanez (who would tie the game with his own blast), he essentially said Byrdak’s job against the Yankees was to pitch to Cano.
Here came Cano. Tie game. Buzzing ballpark.
No Byrdak. All around Citi Field, the buzz was replaced by something else: by the sound of Mets fans among the sold-out crowd of 42,364 engaging in a community-wide first-guess, nobody waiting for hindsight to provide 20-20 clarity.
And, the way things turned out, no need for it.
“The way things turned out,” Collins said, “I should have brought [Byrdak] in.”
Cano blasted this one to the Throgs Neck to make it 6-5, Yankees. It ended 6-5, Yankees. It ended the Subway Series in a 5-1 landslide for the Yankees, and it ruined what had all the makings of the Mets’ best win in a season already brimming with them.
And Collins wouldn’t deny that. Oh, he had his reasons: He double-switched Batista into the game, wanted a second inning out of him so he wouldn’t burn the pen, didn’t want to use Byrdak for one hitter (though there’s no reason he couldn’t have stayed in to face switch-hitters Mark Teixeira and Nick Swisher, too). His explanations were sensible.
And completely beside the point.
“Should have brought him in,” he said a second time.
Does that make you feel better if you’re a Mets fan, the morning after they ended this 25-game gauntlet against top-flight teams at 12-13 and still very much alive in the baseball season? Does it make you feel better that Collins cops to the questions rather than recoiling at them, the way Charlie Manuel did earlier in the day in Philadelphia?
Manuel, still plenty second-guessed despite the championship ring on his resume, grew testy at a round of questions between a pair of losses to Tampa yesterday.
“You guys ought to sit in the dugout with me and give me all the scenarios if you don’t think I know them,” Manuel said at Citizens Bank Park. “We don’t know how to manage the game. Really, I think you guys ought to sit down there with us or Tweet us or something.”
There is no reckoning in those words. Different styles, different strokes, different men. Collins has never run from the ultimate truth of managing: When you make a move and it doesn’t work, it wasn’t the right move. If it’s giving a pitcher extra rest, using an unorthodox pinch hitter.
Or keeping your lefty specialist out of the game when the ballpark is begging you to bring him in.
“We like Miguel because of his sinker, because it keeps the ball in the ballpark,” Collins said. “Only he got his change-up up there.”
He was explaining the inexplicable, and knew it. Look, there’s no guarantee the Mets could win a battle of bullpen attrition with the Yankees even if Batista popped Cano up. Even the first-guessers know that. Maybe Collins even wanted to say it. But his eyes expressed something else, something he’d already said twice.
Should’ve brought him in.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com