The caveat, of course, is this: “If they don’t collapse.” That is supposed to be a rallying cry now, with 90 victories a fantasy, with immediate contention a pipe dream, with the Mets dawdling their way toward 79-83 or 77-85 or, if things really break well from here, 81-81.
These are the conditions that the whispers contain now, as it becomes more and more likely that the Mets will retain Terry Collins at season’s end. And that is the noble mission now: If we don’t collapse. That is the hope. That is the wish. The Mets have 41 games left in what is almost certain to be a sixth straight losing season after Wednesday’s 3-2 loss to the Nationals. They haven’t been at .500 since May 13. They haven’t been fewer than four games under .500 since June 4.
IF WE DON’T COLLAPSE: As baseball slogans go, that doesn’t quite match up with “Baseball Like it Oughta Be” or “Catch the Rising Stars,” but it’ll have to do. And look, we can debate Terry Collins’ qualifications as a big-league manager all day long; I said in this space a week ago that as a field manager, Collins is a fine minor league director and watching him slip on a few more banana peels Wednesday night, I haven’t changed that view. You like him better than that? It’s allowed.
But if this is indeed the way the Mets are thinking — the way they are rooting — then this really does become, from here on in, a total referendum on general manager Sandy Alderson, and less a question of whether Collins should be in the dugout or not. If Collins is back next year — regardless of what the magic number in Alderson’s head is — then he has officially forfeited his right to hire a second manager.
He casts his lot — for better, for worse, for good — with Collins.
If that does happen, it is easy to understand WHY it happens. It goes beyond Collins’ core strengths, which are the relationships he builds with players, the way he has kept some truly woeful teams the past few years from degenerating into Astros territory. And it goes beyond believing that his weaknesses — in-game strategy (bunting Juan Lagares in the ninth inning this time, with Rafael Soriano clearly on the ropes), puzzling lineup choices, an inability to manage a bullpen — are simply victims of poor luck and defiant probability.
No, Collins is the perfect man for the kind of operation Alderson runs because he is, at heart, a company man, a good soldier, a loyal employee. He may resist those shackles from time to time. Wednesday, pregame, we got the briefest possible peek into the dynamic between manager and GM.
“The conversations I have with Sandy,” Collins said, asked if he had a specific kind of player who can be successful here in mind, “are going to stay with Sandy.”
You can start there with why a Wally Backman marriage was never going to happen. Backman was always an opinionated player, he seems to have retained much of that candor as a manager, and short of a lobotomy that’s probably the way he will stay until his final hour in a uniform.
And any manager that’s already established, with both track record and résumé, will have his own views on how this should be done, too. Look, that’s not unique to the Mets. Managers like Buck Showalter are fading away like Marty McFly in the family photo. So are old-school types like Joe Torre, Tony La Russa and Bobby Cox. If you saw or read “Moneyball,” you saw how little Billy Beane cared what Art Howe thought about real issues, and never forget at whose knee Beane interned back in the day.
So another year of Terry Collins — all together now: “if they don’t collapse” — may not exactly be received by the rank-and-file Mets fan the way, say, free ice cream might, but it would clarify something: for better, for worse, for good, the GM is now linked inextricably with his manager. So at least someone thinks it’s a good idea. Now all he has to be is right. Good luck with that.