The Mets Are Just Messy As Hell

The Mets may have seemingly pushed dysfunction to a new level this season—poorly handled injuries, baffling management decisions, various public relations snafus—but, per a juicy new story from Marc Carig of Newsday, the situation was way worse behind the scenes.

Carig’s reporting paints a picture of owner Fred Wilpon hanging onto manager Terry Collins well after the rest of the front office and locker room wanted him gone, with trust breaking down between all parties and players growing increasingly frustrated over Collins’s poor communication. It’s truly worth a read in full, but the gist is simply that the Mets are even more fucked up than anyone may have guessed.

“Once he falls in love with you, he abuses you,” one anonymous official told Carig about how Collins overworks his pitchers. “He has run players into the ground. He has no idea about resting players. Even when you tell him, he doesn’t listen.”

While many of the Mets’ on-field problems this year can be chalked up to injuries—and there were a lot of them, more than any team could have reasonably been expected to overcome—there were plenty of off-field factors complicating the situation, too. Collins’s contract is up at the end of this season and there has been no move to re-sign him, even though he’s publicly said that he doesn’t want to retire. If this is the end of the road for Collins, as expected, then it’s a hell of a final season.

“He did what he could with what he had, but I believe that it turned out that the inmates ran the asylum a bit,” one player told Carig. “He had three or four personalities in there that he essentially had no control over for a multitude of reasons, ranging from the front office allowing it, to guys just not respecting authority at all.”

[ Newsday]