NEW YORK -- Terry Collins met with his New York Mets following their dispiriting Game 2 loss in Kansas City and did what any manager would do when confronted with circumstances as dire as his: He lied.
Never a win-one-for-the-skipper type, Collins kept it short and semi-sweet. This is what he said Thursday that he told his team the night before:
"We've been here before. We can come back. We've done this before. Just remember what we've got to do and let's get after it."
Only these Mets have never been down 0-2 in a World Series (or any postseason series for that matter), so they don't know if they can come back because, you know, they've never done it before. They can't remember what to do because they have no near-identical experience to draw from (Game 5 in Los Angeles was a dicey one, but the World Series it was not). That pretty much leaves the Mets with the "let's get after it" part of Collins' charge.
Let's get after it? Yeah, that the Mets can do.
And here's the sunnier side of the monumental challenge they face starting Friday night in Game 3: The Mets still have a chance to prove they are not merely a good-to-very-good team touched by stardust that ultimately ran into superior hitters who make contact more often than your local tavern's high-arc softball team.
These Mets can still prove they are special, and worthy of standing among the most memorable sports champions this city has ever known. There's no need to rewind your memories all the way back to 1986, when the Mets were down 0-2 to the Red Sox and yet swaggered into Fenway Park embracing two articles of unmitigated faith:
1. The Mets remained convinced they were the more talented team.
2. The Mets knew they were paired against a haunted franchise likely to encounter another ghost or three before the exorcism was complete.
As the 2015 Mets have no such belief after watching what Kansas City hitters did to Jacob deGrom, and as today's Kansas City Royals don't carry around the kind of heavy legacy luggage that weighed down yesterday's Red Sox, the better local story to rally around is the one authored by the 1996 Yankees, the last World Series team to lose the first two games before landing in a parade.
The Yankees were crushed at home by a combined score of 16-1 in Games 1 and 2, and by an opponent more formidable than the Royals. The Atlanta Braves were defending champs, and as they headed back to Atlanta, one side of their plane was talking about a dynasty, and the other side was talking about a sweep. David Cone, the Yankees' Game 3 starter, was enraged upon hearing exaggerated reports from a clubhouse guy that the Braves were all but laughing at the Yanks. Joe Torre then looked a bit like Terry Collins now; he was a likable, thrice-fired lifer who was about to get plenty of pats on the back for finishing second in his first World Series.
Only Torre had already made a private prediction that put Joe Namath's very public one to shame. After Game 1, Torre promised his employer, Boss Steinbrenner, that the Yanks would lose Game 2 to Greg Maddux (that's right, lose Game 2), before sweeping three in Atlanta and then beating Maddux in the Bronx in Game 6.
"He looked at me like I had two heads," Torre would say. A staggered Steinbrenner responded, "OK, go do it."
A former Braves player and manager, Torre assured his players that "Atlanta's my town." He told them the Braves were already icing the champagne, that the Yankees had enough talent and chemistry to make what happened in Games 1 and 2 moot. "Those games are over," Tim Raines would quote Torre as saying. "George Steinbrenner doesn't think we can come back. ... Let's prove that m-----f----- wrong."
Torre didn't only set an emotional Game 3 tone. In Paul O'Neill, Tino Martinez, and Wade Boggs, he benched three players who would finish their careers with combined regular-season and postseason totals of 7,260 hits, 760 homers, and 3,667 RBIs. He benched them in favor of three ultra-worthy reserves in Darryl Strawberry, Cecil Fielder and Charlie Hayes. Torre also moved his rookie shortstop Derek Jeter into the two-hole in the batting order.
Jeter put down a sacrifice bunt in the first inning of Game 3 that moved over Raines, who was driven in on a Bernie Williams hit that finally gave the Yankees a lead in the series, and one that changed everything. Cone channeled his anger into a signature victory, Torre's three subs -- Strawberry, Fielder and Hayes -- combined for seven hits in a Game 4 defined by Jim Leyritz's homer, and a reinserted O'Neill preserved a classic 1-0 victory in Game 5 with a lunging catch on an injured leg before the Yanks honored Torre's prophecy in Game 6.
"Joe was very loyal all year," O'Neill said Thursday by phone, "but when we got to the World Series, Joe and [bench coach] Don Zimmer managed by their gut feeling. I wasn't even in the Game 5 lineup until I went in to talk to Joe, and five minutes later Zim came out with me in the starting lineup.
"You can't manage in the World Series like you do over the long haul during the season. It's very easy right now for Ned Yost to put a lineup out there, but Terry Collins has some decisions to make. You are very loyal to your players through the year, but at this point, as a manager, you have to put yourself in position to win a game. And the best matchups to win a World Series game are not the same as they might be in April or May."
At his Citi Field news conference Thursday, under a NYPD cap worn to honor fallen police officers, Collins said he was not about to make the dramatic lineup changes Torre made for his Game 3. Of course, he doesn't have Strawberry, Fielder and Hayes on his bench. Collins could've ignored Juan Uribe's age, injury, and extreme rust and started him, and he could've broken Twitter by asking his struggling captain, David Wright, to take one for the team. But Collins made it clear he wasn't going there. "Right now we're glad to have Juan on the bench," he said.
The manager has to get the benefit of the doubt here, because Collins has pushed the right human buttons with his team time after time. He did just sweep Joe Maddon and the Cubs after all.
"Kansas City has all the momentum now, and they have to keep it," O'Neill said. "All it takes is one big homer, one error, one play for the Mets and it's going to be hard for the Royals to get it back. We won Game 3 in Atlanta in '96, and all of a sudden the Braves couldn't reverse that momentum. Right now, the Mets have to be telling themselves that all the Royals did was hold their home court."
O'Neill did say that sometimes must-win situations are better dealt with on the road, away from the hometown noise. On the flight back from Game 5 in Atlanta, after making that remarkable catch in the gap on Luis Polonia's laser, O'Neill remembered feeling elated he'd contributed to the cause despite his bum hamstring and struggles at the plate.
He also remembered feeling an overwhelming sense of relief. "If I hadn't gotten that ball," O'Neill said, "I was thinking it would've been another Bill Buckner thing."
Crazy Bill Buckner things seem to happen in baseball more often than in any other sport. Things like the Mets beating the Royals four times in the next five games.
Kansas City has caged the beast within Daniel Murphy, and it has defanged the Mets' two best pitchers, deGrom and Jeurys Familia. It's possible Alex Gordon's ninth-inning homer off Familia will go down in Mets infamy next to Jeter's homer off Bobby Jones (Game 4, 2000 World Series), and Mike Scioscia's homer off Doc Gooden (Game 4, 1988 NLCS).
But it's also possible Noah Syndergaard will throw the kind of heat even the Royals can't hit, and that out of left field Wright and Yoenis Cespedes will start driving balls all over creation. Entering Game 3 of the 1996 World Series in Atlanta, nobody thought the dynasty to come was sitting in the visitors dugout.
Now things look just as bleak on the other side of New York. The Royals appear to be the better, more confident team by a wide margin, and so what?
This is baseball. In other words, the Mets still have the time and opportunity to prove they are special.