Think Mets manager Terry Collins will have it rough this season?
In 2002, Frank Robinson took over as manager of a financially teetering Montreal Expos team that was owned, in a caretaker relationship, by Major League Baseball and appeared headed for contraction.
Robinson coaxed 83 wins out of that team — a minor miracle considering its financial limitations and the distractions the players had to overcome.
But Robinson, now a special adviser to the commissioner, believes Collins and the Mets will face even more daunting challenges this season as the Wilpons and co-owner Saul Katz deal with their role, if any, in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
“It’s a much larger problem than we had in Montreal because it’s ongoing and it deals personally with their ownership, since a lot of them know the Wilpon family,” Robinson told The Post yesterday.
Opening Day is just three days away, and the Mets still are trying to find a minority buyer for the team.
The Wilpons and Katz are fighting a $1 billion “clawback” lawsuit alleging they are a guilty party in the Madoff scheme.
The Mets insist they are victims.
Also, the Mets reportedly are so hard up for cash they had to borrow $25 million from baseball last year — and had their credit from Commissioner Bud Selig closed off when they approached him, hat in hand, more recently.
“My players were jaded by the time I got there, because they had been hearing rumors about the team for a few years,” Robinson recalled.
“For the Mets, it’s all new. It’s going to be a distraction.”
According to Robinson, it will be a matter of how the Mets deal with the unknown that helps decide their fate.
“They’re going to have to deal with questions they can’t answer and don’t even know about,” Robinson said.
And the Madoff scandal has a more far-reaching impact than the possibility of the Expos folding, he said.
“This is more complicated than a baseball team not being around,” Robinson said. “It affects a lot of people in society, not just baseball.
“They’re gonna hear it from the loudmouths in the stands and are going to get barbs all the time.
It’s going to be a difficult season.”
Robinson faced unenviable circumstances when he left the commissioner’s office to take over the Expos, along with Omar Minaya as GM and Vladimir Guerrero approaching his prime. He guided them to a second-place finish in the NL East. A year later, Montreal battled for a wild-card berth — but after the ’04 season, it moved to Washington and became the Nationals.
Robinson, a Hall of Fame player, said he didn’t dwell on the problems with his team that first season.
“In 2002, I talked about the situation with my team before spring training and again before the regular season,” Robinson said.
“It wasn’t a big message or a rah-rah thing. I just told them there was nothing they could do about it, and the players did what they had to do. But it’s not that simple. You don’t keep it off their mind, because you can’t.”
Especially for the Mets, since Robinson knows the story isn’t going away.
“They’re going to be asked about it wherever they go, so they’d better get used to it,” Robinson said.
“They have to be prepared for it, because we dealt with it in every city we went to. If they keep their sanity, they’ll be OK.”
Much of that will be up to Collins, who Robinson believes will be up to the task of keeping his team focused on the field.
“I know Terry, and he’s a very positive individual,” Robinson said. “So I think he’ll deal with it fine.”