First off, why do I always have to recap the losses? I need to speak to management.
If you thought a 15-6 start meant a moratorium on asking what Terry Collins [1] is thinking, well, you weren’t checking in with Mets Twitter as tonight’s game got away [2].
Why pitch to Giancarlo Stanton [3] when you don’t have to? Why have Ruben Tejada [4] bunt with Daniel Murphy [5] on second and no one out? Why, after it turned out Terry gave Ruben the choice to bunt or swing away, let Ruben Tejada [4] choose to do anything? Why leave a struggling Carlos Torres [6] in for the fatal pitch with Michael Morse [7]? WHY GOD WHY?
I asked all of those questions myself, and agreed with some of the insta-rage when things went badly. But not all of it. Deep sigh. Where to start?
How about with the fact that Rafael Montero [8] pitched pretty well? Unlike the loss in Atlanta, he mixed his pitches effectively instead of trying to set a record for most consecutive fastballs thrown. And the confrontation with Stanton came down to one missed location — Montero had craftily worked Stanton in and out on both corners, but one pitch drifted a little too far and one of the best hitters in the game didn’t miss it. The end result wasn’t good, but it seemed like a step forward for a pretty talented young pitcher.
As for Tejada bunting, well, I wasn’t against the idea. (I’ll take Tepid Endorsements for $100, Alex!) You’re trying to maximize the chance of scoring at least one run and thereby accepting less of a chance at a big inning, but with a cold Kirk Nieuwenhuis [9], Anthony Recker [10] and the pitcher’s spot behind Tejada I was OK with trying to grab the lead and keep it for six outs. What I wasn’t OK with was Tejada bunting horribly so that Murph was a dead duck at third. The next time I’m for that idea will be the first.
Then there were Torres’s labors. Carlos walked Martin Prado [11], popped up Stanton, walked Marcell Ozuna [12] and then gave up the liner up the middle by Morse. Ironically, for all that Terry’s been guilty of riding relievers into the ground, the problem might have been that Torres hasn’t worked enough recently and so wasn’t sharp. As for Terry preferring a veteran trying to figure it out on the fly to Erik Goeddel [13] or Hansel Robles [14] (let alone Jeurys Familia [15]), what can you say? Definitely conservative with a hint of mustiness, but not out-and-out crazy.
Maybe I’m just tired, but I find it hard to get too worked up about managers’ decisions and tics. Managers do a lot more damage consistently giving innings and at-bats to bad players then they do selecting matchups and bunting in specific situations, and these days the Mets seem to be keeping Terry on a tight leash in terms of personnel by denying him the likes of Eric Young [16] Jr. and Bobby Abreu [17]. (No, I wouldn’t put Michael Cuddyer [18] in that group — dude can still hit, and has had some terrible luck so far this year.) A good manager might get you a win or two over a season and a bad manager might take one or two away, but over 162 games that’s probably too little to worry about compared with the drift you’ll get from simple luck. (The same goes for batting orders, which simply don’t matter enough to get worked up over.)
Managing is also one spot where I think we get too hung up on quantitative analysis as the ideal lens for everything. We can’t see what managers are doing in the clubhouse, in their offices, and on the field during workouts, and having never spent eight months as a traveling band of baseball players we don’t know the importance of all that — we have to rely on beat writers’ reports and then infer stuff from there. I can’t quantify the value of Collins having a heart to heart with Dillon Gee [19] about his unpleasant winter, but I’m glad he did it. Along the same lines, I don’t know what a guy heralded as an instructor’s doing at 5:30 pm before games, or how he navigates players’ expectations about their roles, decides when to give them days off, selects when to push them into spots they may not be ready for and when to pull them back, and so forth.
I can’t measure any of that stuff, but it has to have some effect on the Mets and whether they win more than they lose. So is Terry good at that stuff? It seems to me that he is. Is the effect of all that more important than the cumulative effect of in-game moves that make me throw the remote? I wish we had a way to measure that.
As for losing to the Marlins in front of Loria and his Red Grooms sculpture, I don’t need a quantitative lens. Because that sucks any way you measure it.