Sunday Sports.

This is something else from the drafts queue circa 2010 (it sure doesn’t seem like 7 years ago!).

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to manage this beyond today but people who know me, know I am an avid fan of baseball and though opinionated I believe I have a better than most sense of the game and a keen acumen for judging talent.

That was why I went to two people I knew in June of last year and said it was the Yankee’s year to win it all (and was right), that’s why I wrote well in advance of the actual event (two plus months) that the Mets would be wise to trade for Johan Santana and also why my assessment of the Yankees coming into this season was spot on.

I still love baseball although I have to say over the last week I feel as if I am in Bizarro World as the Mets are playing like I expected the Yankees to play and the Yankees are playing like I expected the Mets to play.

I have a running text dialog with a family friend who is a big Mets fan and I am always surprised by her knee jerk reactions to things which really aren’t too far off from most of fandom.

I’m actually more measured in my views of baseball which is surprising given how that differs in many ways from my normal approach to other areas of life.

Now, this is also from 2010 although it appears I had gone back at some point to address it it still has the original draft publish date which is odd. You  can see I keep going back to the well on the John Santana thing.

The sad thing about John Santana is how Terry Collins destroyed his career by letting him throw 134 pitches to get a complete game and the no hitter. It was a mistake plain and simple and one of the many careers that was destroyed by the ‘great communicator’ people said Collins was.

If you do a search on the web what’s funny is that you’ll see folks saying it wasn’t that game that put an end to Santana’s career but the truth of it is that he was never the same pitcher after that.

Terry Collins was a horrible manager and for all the talk about Collins being a great communicator there are just too many instances where players were hurt and it appeared that no one on the Mets coaching staff knew about it or the problem was just plain ignored. If you go back over the Collins years you see it happening again and again and again.

Collins is likely one big reason David Wright’s career went the way it did because the back problem was something that Collins has Wright play through which made the situation way worse that much quicker than it likely would have been had it been addressed before it became acute.

Think I’m making stuff like this up? Anyone remember Matt Harvey in the World Series?

I could go on about how inept Terry Collins was as a manager but the thing that really bothers me is that because he was such a brown-noser he hung around way longer than he should have been allowed and as a result he’s number one on the list of Mets managers by the games he managed.

Thing is?

Collins was with the Mets for seven years, the same amount of time two GREAT managers spent with the team in the form of Davey Johnson and Bobby Valentine.

Here’s where we CAN make a comparison because although Collins was first in the number of games managed though he spent the same amount of time with the Mets, in important stats he places so, so low it just underscores what a disaster he was.

In the measurement of games over .500 (meaning if the team won more than it lost) Johnson is number one on the list his overall record is 178 games over .500 (OVER A FULL SEASON’S WORTH OF GAMES) and Valentine is number two with a record of 69 games over .500.

Collins? He comes in at number 16 (out of a list of 22) with an overall -32 BELOW .500 (and that’s even with managing more games).

Winning percentage?

Johnson comes in at .588 (first) and Valentine comes in at .534 (third).

Collins?

.486 number 11!

Here’s another big difference too in the form of competition... when Johnson was manager the National League was only two divisions with 7 teams in each division. Johnson’s average finish in the division over 7 years was 1.7 (number one out of all Mets managers).

Valentine’s average finish was 2.9 and that was with a Braves dynasty that had one of the most vaunted rotations in baseball with three future Hall-of-Famers (Maddux, Smoltz and Glavine)

In another measure, team’s average finish in the division?

Collins is number four and this is with a Cy Young award winner (R.A. Dickey), a batting champ (Jose Reyes), a rookie of the year (Jacob DeGrom) and a host of other talent that was mismanaged and squandered. It’s also at a time when there was no DOMINANT team in the division.

Anyway, if you get the sense I’m glad Terry Collins is gone from the Mets manager’s chair you’d be right.