What happens first: Terry Collins is fired, or Jon Niese murders him?
— Metstradamus (@Metstradamus) July 4, 2014
If you notice, I asked this question on July 4th. I forget why … probably something having to do with Terry Collins taking Jon Niese out of a game too early, which Niese never seems to appreciate. Never would I have thought that the odds on option number two happening would be anything lower than 1,000,000-1, but Vegas might have to lower those odds a tad going into next season:
In the third inning of that Friday night home game against the Astros, after Ruben Tejada had drawn a walk, Collins signaled for his pitcher to bunt. With the corner infielders charging, however, Niese decided to swing away and flied out, thereby angering his manager. According to players and coaches who were there, Collins jumped Niese as he came back to the dugout:
“What the (bleep) was that?” the manager demanded.
“They were coming down my throat so I tried to slash,” Niese said.
“Next time get the bunt down like we told you,” Collins continued.
“F— you,” Niese said. “Take me out if you don’t like it.”
The exchange was obviously heated, although on Thursday Collins insisted Niese didn’t say it in exactly those words.
“If a player ever said FU to me there would be a fight,” he said. “That’s not what he said. He got ticked off and said ‘let me play the game the way I (bleeping) want to.'”
At that point, Collins said he sent Niese on his way by barking at him, “Just play the game right.”
Still, you can make the case that he could have pulled Niese to send a message, especially as the Mets were playing out the string, but Collins said he didn’t feel it was necessary.
“I know Jon like the back of my hand,” he said. “He’s so wired during a game, when you say something to him in a situation like that he’s snaps. The players know it so I don’t worry that they might get the wrong idea. It’s not like they see me backing away from a situation like that.”
One player who saw the incident agreed, saying it wasn’t as shocking as it may sound to an outsider, largely because it was Niese.
“That was just him being a knucklehead,” the player said.
Keep in mind, and I stress that one probably has nothing to do with the other, that this was the game that Jon Niese left early with an elevated heartbeat. I hope that Terry Collins isn’t stressing him out unnecessarily. Niese seems stressed out enough during the regular season. And speaking of stressing out, this doesn’t count as “tweeting about the clubhouse“, right? Because it happened in the dugout. So we’re cool, right? I don’t want to make Jon mad.
So what have we learned? Well …
- Jon Niese is a knucklehead, or has knucklehead tendencies.
- Someone besides Charles Barkley uses the term “knucklehead”.
- Terry Collins will signal bunt and defend his God-given right to signal bunt until the day he dies.
Being an MLB.tv subscriber, I have the luxury of going back and watching that at-bat, hoping to have seen the incident in the dugout. But the interesting part was that I watched the at-bat on both coverages. Niese pulled back and slashed on the first pitch and the third pitch, the one where he flied out. After the first pitch, Gary Cohen noted that Matt Dominguez was coming in hard at third base. After the flyout, Keith Hernandez called the play “a good idea”. On the other side, Alan Ashby was incredulous that Niese would pull back and slash after the first pitch, and after the flyout, Ashby said that Niese did the Astros a favor. Geoff Blum noted that he had played on teams where the manager would give the bunt sign but the pitcher would have the option of slashing if the defense overplayed the bunt.
Obviously that wasn’t the case here. And from the conversation above, it seems as if Collins got a little too ornery about Jon Niese using some judgement during the last Friday of a meaningless season. Players obviously must execute the plan of the manager without fail on the New York Mets. Hey, Collins obviously can’t use his own judgement when putting together a lineup since we all know Sandy is doing it for him, so Collins will hold on to whatever decisions he still has the authority to make, such as bunting in the third inning of a meaningless game. Never mind that Niese was engaged enough to notice that Dominguez was coming instead of just being zombied out during the last Friday of the season. When the manager says bunt, you BUNT … dammit.
But what we’ve really … really learned here is that I have so much to do on a Thursday night that I just watched multiple coverages of a flyout to left field in the third inning of a game that meant absolutely nothing. It couldn’t have been all that big a deal, because there was no tape of any conversation played during that inning or at the beginning of the next inning containing any dugout conversation. And still, I wrote two paragraphs on my findings. I watched more of this game now than I did when it was being played. So the Oliver Stone of blogging, I’m not. I can’t be that devoid of entertainment, can I?
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