There Terry Collins stood, and sat, and posed, and primped, through a slickly stage-managed press conference, through a gaggle of one-on-ones with the television folk, through a mass clustering of the ink-stained notebook brigade, through the static gauntlet of talk-radio interrogation.
All managers and coaches like to talk on Press Conference Day about their grandest goals and their loftiest ambitions, and Collins was not immune from the temptation, speaking with a straight face about the 2011 Mets as the “last team standing” next November. If that vision in this town yields a tour down the Canyon of Heroes then this, at the opposite end of the journey, is an excursion through the Chasm of Skeptics.
And here is what Collins didn’t do during this endless parade of propaganda, hour after hour of defending his record and promoting his team and explaining his philosophy and offering remorse for his DUI and falling on sword after sword after sword for past clubhouses lost and alienated:
He didn’t pull a Michael Douglas from “Falling Down.”
He didn’t go all Sonny Corleone on anyone.
He didn’t have the kind of how-do-you-do with a photographer that Randy Johnson had on his first day in New York City a few years back.
He managed to keep himself from overturning the breakfast buffet set up at the Caesar’s Club at Citi Field, managed to keep all the water coolers on the fifth floor intact, never once ripped off his royal-blue cap or tore his cream-colored home uniform (with No. 10, in honor of Jim Leyland) to shreds.
Truth be told, Collins seemed to like the process, seemed to enjoy telling his side of all the tales we have heard about him.
“I’m not the evil devil I’ve been made out to be,” he said.
The Terry Collins we saw yesterday sounded like the kind of manager that players like to play for, for whom they like to play hard, for whom they will get their uniform dirty.
Convincing a room filled with klieg lights and tape recorders of all of that is one thing, of course, and doing likewise to a clubhouse of jaded, hardened, entitled big leaguers is something else, and the Mets know all about winning press conferences in winter and losing baseball games in the summer.
But if you are a Mets fan, there were two things Collins said yesterday that have to offer a glint of belief that the team might well have gotten this hire right.
First, his accounting of the way his tenure in Anaheim careened off the rails in 1999, when a team picked by some to win the AL West wound up sputtering early and dying quickly, finally cratering during on an onfield brawl when some players decided it wasn’t worth the hassle to fight back on behalf of a manager for whom they had lost respect.
“I did a bad job, a terrible job,” Collins said of his Anaheim ouster. “And I will guarantee for you right now that will never happen again.”
It’s easy for the freshly hired to boast of the latter, harder to acknowledge the former. If that establishes a precedent of self-accountability, then that is a wise place to start.
The other was a simpler mission statement that, juxtaposed against a baseball culture in Queens that has alternated between sour and bitter for far too long, should resonate with even the most wounded Mets fan who wears cynicism as a shield:
“I don’t ask my players to respect the game,” he said. “I demand it.”
You have to believe that this wasn’t the first time Collins uttered those damning dozen words the past few weeks, even if he insisted he wasn’t around the Mets’ clubhouse the past few years to recognize the rot that had set in around the team’s fundamental baseball values. You have to believe that Collins, clearly a bright man, saw enough from afar that had to gall his old-school sensibilities. And that
Sandy Alderson saw the same thing.
The real work awaits in February. For now, if it’s difficult to encourage a Mets fan to share Collins’ vision of a parade next November, it’s easier to sell something else: You probably will throw your remote control across the room a lot less in 2011.
That may be a small start. But it is a start.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com