By all means let’s get lathered up over Terry Collins’ poor choice to take on the fans. Let’s vilify him for getting caught between a rock and a rock head — that would be Jordany Valdespin, by the way.
Collins should know by now the undisputed champions of every metropolis are the fans — right or wrong, kind or crude. They stay and eventually everyone else goes. It doesn’t matter if Collins might be technically right — that none of them truly has a handle on his clubhouse or all the conversations transacted between manager and his charge. You simply can’t take them on and win, especially when your team isn’t.
And Collins’ team isn’t winning. So you should understand why he might be losing it. He turns 64 later this month. He was run out of Houston and Anaheim. There is no next managing job. This is more than his last best chance. It is just plain his last chance to prove he is a good major league manager.
Which he really hasn’t been given a chance to do yet two-and-a-quarter seasons into his Mets tenure. That is why it is so silly that we are going to get caught up in the sideshow of whether Collins should stay or go, now or later. We just don’t have all the facts to make a strong decision, so talking about this would just be a distraction from the day-to-day misery.
For if you know whether Collins is a good manager or bad manager based on his Mets time, you are a heck of an evaluator. You want to argue not enough guys have gotten better under his charge, fine, but I would ask if you see many players with high ceilings in his dugout. If you want to insist craftier strategy would have won a few more games, I will disagree, but still wonder if getting to, say, 77 wins would be making anyone happy.
The strongest argument I believe anyone has is that Collins has failed to change the culture — that there still are too many Mets who feel like they have accomplished something when they haven’t, or that the roster still has no collective idea what it takes to put aside individualism and alibis and prioritize winning on a daily basis. But this might be more of a problem from the top of the hierarchy down than someone in middle management, like Collins, could impact.
The best work I ever have seen in this area was by Buck Showalter with the early-1990s Yankees. He was a master fumigator of those who obstructed winning (an aside: Valdespin would have been optioned to Singapore if Showalter managed him). But it also must be said that each season Showalter was Yankees skipper, then-GM Gene Michael fed him better and better players.
That is not being done for Collins. In fact, it is relatively easy to argue his second-year team had worse talent than his first and this, his third team, has worse talent than his second — stunning when you consider he has Matt Harvey this time. That is why I have no idea if Collins is a good manager or not. Showalter would lose big with this team, and so would Tony La Russa and Joe McCarthy and Casey Stengel. Or some cloned combo of all of them.
That is why the should Terry stay-or-go debate is nothing but a distraction. We all can do the manhunt for a better manager, but that would be like having a good faucet head in a house without indoor plumbing. Until the talent base improves, everything else is just a sideshow. If you think, for example, Wally Backman will do much better with this group, then my advice is to come out of your 1986 time warp.
The last Mets manager to succeed was Willie Randolph, and he was given Pedro Martinez, Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado and Billy Wagner to team with the young Jose Reyes and David Wright and the still-succeeding Tom Glavine. Collins has had the opposite, pretty much — the removal of anything approaching veteran talent from this roster and a bunch of booby prizes put in their place.
It was acknowledged going into this season that the Mets had assembled one of the worst outfields in history, so is it Collins’ fault that it is collectively hitting .215 and just might be worse on defense than offense?
For the third straight year Collins is being told to play the “we have to find out who Ike Davis, Lucas Duda and Daniel Murphy are” game. We can stop now. Until further evidence, they are supplementary players on a second-division team.
Davis is Ryan Howard lite — he can’t hit lefties, strikes out a ton and is not much in the clutch. Duda is Jason Giambi lite — walks, some homers, meager athleticism and also a clutch deficiency. Murphy is a streaky singles hitter who seems to talk himself into extended slumps worrying about mechanics.
The rotation was a wing-and-prayer at best with caution flags like Shaun Marcum, Johan Santana and Dillon Gee. And so you have this: Met starters have failed to reach even five innings in an NL-high 14 games or in 45.2 percent of those not started by Harvey.
No manager could manipulate a bullpen to cover that level of rotation malfeasance. But try doing it restrained by how much you can ask on any day or any back-to-back days from two thirty-somethings with pre-existing elbow problems (Brandon Lyon and the now-DL’d Scott Atchison), the second-oldest pitcher in the NL (40-year-old LaTroy Hawkins) and a lefty who needed 14 minor league seasons to break into The Show (Scott Rice).
So, really, Jordany Valdespin is the problem? Or how he is handled? Or the identity of the manager?
This is about lack of talent, not Collins. He might be sacrificed because organizations have to look like they are doing something in response to serial losing. But no Mets manager ever will get a truly fair judgment if Sandy Alderson never figures out how to enrich the talent level of the 25-man roster.
joel.sherman@nypost.com