Terry Collins Doesn’t Take No Guff

Terry Collins is a feisty and tough manager. This is a fact, it’s on his Wikipedia page and everything. As such, he doesn’t take any tomfoolery or shenanigans from anyone, especially not these so-called “professional baseball players” who populate the roster of the “New York Mets.” First, Collins took offense to his new shortstop, Ruben Tejada, not showing up early to ball camp earlier than the required date. This is not the first time he’s had a problem with this wildly selfish and destructive practice. To be fair, Tejada really did drop the ball on this one by not showing up days ahead of schedule to Met’s camp (with no instruction or reason to do so other than the eternal competitive fire that rages inside of him), so much so that Collins saw it necessary to lambast his player a second time to the media. Fair’s fair when you’re dealing with a gritty and rigid manager like Terry Collins.

Not only does the quarrelsome and tenacious manager have an issue with not being early, he also doesn’t like it when players get hurt. They should really decide not to get hurt, and if they do decide to get hurt, they should at least have the decency to pick an ailment with a quick recovery time. Injuries are super annoying when you’re trying to run a ball club. All these silly scrapes and bruises and headaches and rib cage muscle tears and valley fevers really grind Terry Collins’ gears. He’d like dirt to be rubbed on the inflicted areas and so on. Grind it out boys. It’s a long season and this is Spring Training, and everybody knows that the only way to have a long and productive Regular Season is to grit your teeth through injuries and brazenly play through maladies as soon and with as much rigor as possible. Get used to it. For goodness sake, show some guts.

Terry Collins, zestful and brawny Major League Baseball manager has certain expectations, reasonable expectations. And when his reasonable expectations are not met by his players, he gets grumpy. And surly. And churlish. If it isn’t too much trouble, he’d like his players to not just show up on time, but show up early. He’d like them to not get hurt. He’d like all outs to be turned into double plays and all double plays turned into triple plays. He’d like his pitchers to strike batters out with just two pitches as to be more efficient. He wants his baserunners to take not just the extra base, but the extras two bases. He expects the Mets to win 163 games.

Seeing as these ridiculous baseball players insist on disrespecting Terry Collins substantial authority, he’s been working on his patience recently. It’s hard to come by when you’re as truculent and sinewy a manager as he is. It makes sense he’d have to resort to such drastic measures as having his wife beat him up and potentially sparring with a bear. Or maybe Collins is just nuts. That’s an angle I hadn’t considered until just now. Nevermind. Forget I said anything. This post is over and I’m sure as hell not going to rewrite it after all that time I spent with the thesaurus.

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Kyle writes baseball nonsense at The Trance of Waiting. You can follow him on Twitter @AgainstKyle.