With the Mets falling 9-1 on Sunday and being swept by the Pirates at PNC Park, Terry Collins immediately called a meeting with his team at the conclusion of Sunday’s game.
Collins wanted to ensure the players weren’t hanging their heads in the wake of the news David Wright was out indefinitely with spinal stenosis.
“It is deflating a little bit,” an obviously perturbed Collins explained. “They were thinking he was going to be back here in five or six days. Now we don’t know when that is going to take place. But you’ve got to deal with adversity at this level and continue to pick yourself and move forward. So we will do that.”
Collins wanted to ensure the team they cannot hang their heads and have to improve their quality of play on the field.
“This is not about who is not here. This is about who is here,” Collins said. “If they’re here, they’re good enough. So we’ve got to start playing like it.
“Right now we’re on the edge because of the news yesterday. Some of the things that have happened physically to some guys. You’ve got to go play. Every team goes through it. Every team is going to go through it. This is our stage. We are not dead. We’re not dead in the water by any stretch of the imagination. They’ve just got to get it going. We plan on starting tomorrow.”
Collins has been particularly disturbed by his team’s approach at the plate recently. They’ve struck out 55 times since Wednesday, have grounded into eight double plays since Thursday, and were outscored 21-4 in their series against the Pirates.
Asked how he expects his team to improve their approach, Collins said it’s about improving the process at the plate.
“What always happens when you go through tough times is they want to be the guy that breaks it open instead of just doing their part and leaving it maybe for the next guy. So we have to get back to that,” he explained.
Collins has every right to be perturbed after what his team put on display this weekend. It was an epic fail all around, not just with the bats but on the mound as well. He seemed very agitated today, he was most certainly very agitated after their series in Chicago too.
The players came away in approval of what Collins said in the meeting.
“He said all the right things,” Jon Niese told reporters after the game. “I told him in the cafeteria afterward, ‘I couldn’t have said it better myself.’”
“What [Collins] said was good,” Michael Cuddyer said. “This series is over. We’re going to go in where we’ve been playing really well, at home, and execute, recognize situations and execute those situations.”
He could be feeling a little bit of heat and pressure to succeed too, which is reasonable considering his own status and the expectations on him and the team to win, which they are not doing very much of lately.
Despite the team’s struggles, Collins certainly isn’t questioning the effort of his team.
“We’re just not executing,” Collins said. “For five years, the effort has never been a question. We’ve just got to go back and start doing the little things.”
At the same time, right now Collins is dealing with a similar hand that he was dealt over his first four years as manager of the team.
He has 11 of the players he expected to be here currently on the disabled list, two more who are active but are dealing with nagging injuries, and has had unusual and imbalanced roster for most of the year pretty much since Opening Day. They’re once again asking minor leaguers to perform here on an everyday basis, bench players to be starters.
That’s just not something that’s going to work. It’s been proven time and time again. It’s not realistic to expect Collins – or any manager – to succeed under these conditions.
And, it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change anytime soon, unless the front office injects the roster with changes from the outside.
Just Mets 