After the second consecutive heartbreaking loss to the Marlins, manager Terry Collins spoke to his team.
“I just told the guys, ‘We came on this road [trip] .500, we’re going home above .500,’” Collins said to Mike Puma of the New York Post. “We’ve got to take that as a positive, not a negative. Should we have won more? Maybe. But we didn’t. Can’t worry about that.”
Baseball is a competition, and a true competition must end with both a winner and a loser. Unfortunately, in two straight games, the hard-fighting Mets ended up being the loser. However, no team has ever won 162 games in a season – In fact, no team has won more than 116. The very best teams in history lost plenty of heartbreakers like these two games, and Terry wanted to reassure his team that there will be plenty more wins.
“This is a good baseball team,” Collins said. “We have issues like everybody else, but we’re trying to mesh a pitching staff that we’ve got to be careful with and a bullpen we’ve got to be careful with, and we’re going to be OK.”
The Mets are a very good baseball team, better than the Marlins. However, one of the countless beautiful things about baseball is also one of the ugliest, and that is on any given day, any team can beat any team. You could go to the park expecting to see a star hitter blast three home runs off a “no-name” starter, only to witness a Dallas Braden perfect game.
These losses sucked and they sting a bit extra because it’s a division rival. The Mets just need to take this well-timed day off and regroup, remembering that they’re a better team than the Marlins and the next time they come to town, the results will be much different.
