Joe McCarthy and Casey Stengel were called push-button managers while directing the Lordly Yankees of the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and 1960 to 18 AL pennants and 14 World Series.
Terry Collins of the 2016 Mets only wishes he had the buttons to push that his Hall of Fame forebears did on the other side of town, but there is one button this manager never would go near, and that is the panic button, no matter how much of the roster is disabled, no matter how much it appears that fate has conspired against his team.
“The minute [players] sense panic in the manager, the minute they sense panic in the coaches, they panic,” Collins said before his team celebrated a Robert Gsellman Day with a 3-1 victory over the Nationals that moved the Mets to within one game of the Cardinals for the second wild-card spot. “I don’t care if they’re veterans or if they’re young guys. It is what it is, you have to deal with it, but the only thing that matters is the attitude in that room, and that is to stay positive as much as you can.”
The Mets would have been excused if they dropped out of the running under the staggering weight of their own injuries that — where to begin? — limited David Wright to 164 plate appearances, Lucas Duda to 145 and Matt Harvey to 92 innings pitched for the season.
Begin there, add DL stints for Yoenis Cespedes, Neil Walker, Asdrubal Cabrera, Steven Matz, Travis d’Arnaud and then take into account the discomfort that has afflicted Jacob deGrom and at times Noah Syndergaard, and the Mets’ position in the wild-card chase is a mini-miracle in its own right.
The 67-year-old Collins, in the first year of a two-year extension he received following the World Series defeat to Kansas City, has established the tone for this group that often seems undermanned but rarely, if ever, is outworked or fails to perform to the max. True enough, sometimes the manager’s bullpen maneuvers can be perplexing, and sometimes the club suffers when Collins manages with his heart rather than his head.
But his big heart has become part of the DNA of a team that plays with it regardless of who is down or out. Make no mistake. This is his team.
And his team — his battered and imperfect team — is one game out of a playoff berth with four weeks remaining in the season.
“I think it starts here,” Collins said when asked if he or the club’s veteran leadership core is responsible for establishing a tone in the face of adversity. “I know you guys think I blow a lot of smoke, but I still think that’s how you have to do it. You walk in every day as if it’s a new day. You can’t worry about yesterday. Just like the other day, we won the game and were heading into Sept. 1, and yeah, the Sept. 1 callups were coming, but the one thing I told those guys was how impressed I was with the fact that we’re starting September in a pennant race. There’s nothing like it because they didn’t let down or get down and kept it going.”
Four of the nine Mets in the April 3 Opening Night lineup in Kansas City are done for the year — Wright, Walker, Juan Lagares and Harvey — with the team holding out hope Duda, sidelined since May 20, might be available to make a late-season cameo. Saturday’s batting order was the club’s 111th different one in 136 games.
“It’s changed the entire dynamic,” Collins said. “We play the Cardinals, we play the Giants, and it’s the same lineup every night. [The Nationals], they have one switch [for this game]. That’s a luxury we don’t have. We have to mix and match, but I also think what that does is, when you’re coming to the ballpark, you have a chance to be in the game so nobody’s coming in here saying, ‘Well, I know that I’m not playing.’ That’s an attitude we can’t have here.”
The Mets play hard, and they play hard for Collins, a people person who not only refused to pile on Cespedes for playing a round of golf the morning of a game at Yankee Stadium (while nursing his quad) but endorsed his most important everyday player’s right to do so. A mutual trust flows between Collins and the playing personnel.
The Mets have question marks aplenty at the top of the stretch. Collins isn’t one of them. There’s no quit in him or his team. No panic either.