How Much Longer Will Terry Collins Survive?

With the Mets tying a season high of seven games under .500 and 10 and a half games behind the first place Nationals (not to mention a half-game behind the second place Braves and tied with the Marlins), it is safe to ask how much longer Terry Collins will be at the helm of the team. The answer is Collins will likely survive the rest of the season. After that, well, he could be gone.

It is no secret that the main reason the Mets are in their current predicament is because injuries have decimated the team. Obviously, that is not Collins’s fault. And considering how much maneuvering Collins has had to do around the injuries, he is doing a pretty good job.

It is also no secret that Terry Collins’s in-game management has left something to be desired, especially when it comes to utilizing his severely overworked bullpen.

However, that is no reason for Sandy Alderson to pull the plug on Collins now. He has lived with Collins’s sometimes head scratching decisions for nearly six and a half seasons now (and a managerial team record 1027 games); this is nothing new to him.

Plus, by all accounts, the players love Collins, so there is no “he lost the clubhouse” excuse on which to fall back.

No, considering everything Collins has been through with this team — managing those awful early teams Alderson gave him — the GM will allow Collins to finish out the season and then allow him to gracefully retire. Collins has been saying all along that this could be his last season, so he would seemingly be going out on his own terms.

And besides, who would take over the team? Alderson doesn’t have Wally Backman to kick around anymore. And no one on the coaching staff has big league experience (nice job security move by Collins if he picked his own coaches!).

The only way I see Alderson firing Terry Collins during the season would be if the Mets got back to full strength and were within striking distance of a playoff spot, but Collins continued to make bad decisions that were costing the Mets critical games. Then, if Alderson thought firing him would mean the difference between making the playoffs or not, he might pull the trigger.

But the odds of that are remote. No, Terry Collins will almost certainly be the manager for the rest of 2017, and deservedly so. Next season? — that’s anyone’s guess.