The New York Mets have no intention of firing manager Terry Collins, despite the team’s recent free-fall, general manager Sandy Alderson said.
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In any case, Mets people don’t necessarily blame Collins for the disappointing 40-40 record and standing 3 1/2 games beind first-place Washington (which is also viewed as somewhat underachieving) in the NL East division.
Daniel Murphy just returned to the lineup Tuesday after missing three-plus weeks with a quadriceps injury, and David Wright and Travis d’Arnaud remain on the disabled list. “It’s all about winning, but you’ve got to enjoy coming to the park”, Collins said.
Should the Mets losing continue, the obvious candidates to replace Collins would be bench coach Bob Geren, the safer choice, third base coach Tim Teufel or Wally Backman, the Triple-A Las Vegas manager, who’d be preferred by some fans for his fiery personality. I think to put all of this on Terry is grossly unfair.
The Mets front office met internally on Thursday, but even with the team struggling, sources with direct knowledge of the discussions said manager Terry Collins was not among the topics addressed.
“We discussed it. At this point, he’s still in Binghamton and I expect him to be over the near term”, Alderson said. I’m here because this is what was planned.
Overall, the Mets entered play having scored two runs or fewer in 12 of their last 14 games. I’m here this trip because that’s the way we worked it out beforehand – well beforehand.
Well, they do have more starting pitchers than they need for one rotation.
Collins joked Thursday that in his quest to revive the Mets, “the only thing left is human sacrifice”. We’ve got some young guys in particular that aren’t hitting and some older players that are maybe trying to carry the load. They’ll go into the All-Star break with three against the Diamondbacks at home before beginning the second half with a six-game road trip against the Cardinals and Nationals.
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“What we’ve got to do is combine the two”.
