PORT ST. LUCIE — Terry Collins went through his routine of wandering around while his players stretched and he noticed an abundance of questions about the meaning of 90 wins — the number general manager Sandy Alderson told Mets personnel was possible at a meeting and a number Fred Wilpon said “we better” achieve.
The Mets manager figured there was no sense running from it and rather saw it as a motivational tool.
“I told a lot of guys in stretch, take it as a compliment,” Collins told The Post on Friday. “This is what your organization thinks of you. … I look at 90 wins as a way of telling guys in that room that they are good enough to do that.”
Collins actually plans to go further with this 90-win theme. He intends, late in camp when he has a clearer idea of who will be on his roster, to go to each individual player and define what that player must do to help the team achieve that victory level. He said, for example, the goals might change, but he could go to Bartolo Colon, Dillon Gee and Jon Niese and say, we need 215 innings from each of you, and to Zach Wheeler and ask for 200 innings and whoever wins the first base job between Ike Davis and Lucas Duda and ask for 25 homers.
“I am not going to ask anything that these players are not capable of — I will not ask Ruben Tejada to hit 25 homers,” Collins said. “It is about giving little personal goals to try to be clear about how we get to those 90 wins.
“We know what we want to achieve, now we have to look at the dots and how to connect them to get there. Look, we have made nice additions to this team and feel we can win, so we are going to be asking some guys to reach these expectations.”
Collins acknowledged he does not have a perfect roster. But he said there is a difference between having questions and holes, and he said he believes the Mets have reached the point at which they will not have black holes on the 25-man roster.
“If we just reach our expectations, then 90 wins certainly are something that can be attained,” he said. “That is how I took [what Alderson said]. A lot can happen, but we can put 90 wins together.”