If you’re a baseball team itching to fire your manager, you can set the standard with a basic question: “Are we better off with someone else, anyone else, but him?”
If your preference is to stay the course and you think your manager can execute a turnaround, you change your parameter: “Has the team quit on him?”
My sense is the Mets, who begin a critical homestand Tuesday night against National League Central-leading Milwaukee, would rather keep Terry Collins at least through the duration of the 2014 season. Likewise, I don’t see the Mets players quitting on Collins. If anything, they’re trying too hard to alleviate the pressure.
Which is why it makes sense to give Collins more rope before removing him from his office.
The Mets’ current six-game losing streak, which followed a seemingly momentum-changing 4-1 series in Philadelphia, has contained five games in which Collins’ bunch took a lead. In the sixth game, the 7-4 loss to the Cubs on June 5, they tied the game at 4-4 after Jacob deGrom put them in a 4-0 hole. Against baseball’s best team, the Giants, this past weekend, the Mets held a seventh-inning lead on Friday, a ninth-inning lead on Saturday and a second-inning lead on Sunday.
In all, as first pointed out by SNY (courtesy of the Elias Sports Bureau), the Mets lead the majors with 21 losses in games in which they led.
That reflects the Mets’ reality: 1) They field an offense that struggles to give its pitchers breathing room; and 2) They deploy a bullpen that treats a lead — or a tie — like the tiara that Marie gave to Skyler in “Breaking Bad”: something to be returned at the first possible moment.
Can either of these Achilles’ heels be laid primarily at the feet of Collins? It doesn’t seem fair.
Maybe the bullpen’s exhaustion from the Philly extra-inning-fest manifested itself in Chicago and San Francisco. On the offensive side, you could argue that the biggest underachiever is captain David Wright, whose struggles you certainly wouldn’t blame on Collins; the Chris Young signing looked like a considerable risk last November and now looks like a bust.
The Mets’ 8-17 record in one-run games gives them the most such losses in the industry and the second-worst winning percentage (.320); the Cubs are 5-11, for a .313 clip. This can be attributed to the same two problems, and it explains why the Mets are underperforming their run differential (252 runs scored, 257 allowed) by six games.
A club can pin such a disparity on its manager, and Xs and Os arguably mark Collins’ weak spot. Collins got beat up in the Twitterverse last month when he repeatedly played Eric Young Jr. over Juan Lagares in the outfield, and Collins did get carried away with his man crush on the speedy, streaky Young. The irony, of course, is that Collins now has neither player, with both of them on the disabled list and not expected back anytime soon.
Yet a team also can look at its run differential and the record that doesn’t match and think that it has some breaks coming its way. One-run losses, after all, mean you almost won. Another break or two and results can change.
Six years ago, when Willie Randolph found himself on the Mets’ hot seat, The Post’s Joel Sherman wrote this: “A manager is best served with allies in four areas: 1) clubhouse; 2) front office; 3) media; 4) fan base. Randolph is pretty much 0-for-4.”
Collins right now is pretty much 3-for-4; we’ll say that he has essentially lost the fan base. He has built up some goodwill, serving as an affable frontman during a period when ownership slashed payroll at an unconscionable rate. Young players like Daniel Murphy, Lucas Duda, Zack Wheeler and the injured Matt Harvey and Bobby Parnell have developed under his watch.
If you watched the Mets’ last six games, or even just their last three, you saw a team that wanted to win and that didn’t relent. It just didn’t execute enough.
That isn’t a team in need of a new face and voice in the manager’s chair. Not yet, anyway. The Mets can be better off with Collins. Now it’s time for them to prove that.