Terry Collins probably won’t be back as Mets manager next season

The Mets’ season hasn’t shaped up to be even close to what they hoped it would be. They are sitting in fourth place in their division at a woeful 55-71, with injuries mounting up left and right and basically their entire pitching rotation having missed time throughout the year if not the majority of the season.

The next loss (that is if nobody else gets injured in the next month-plus of time) is now looking to be manager Terry Collins, according to reports from FanRagSports’ Jon Heyman.

No one’s saying it, but people around the team all seem to be assuming there’s almost no way he’ll be back -- whether it be due to his choice or the team’s. No one expected the Mets to be 55-70, and it may not be a positive sign that no one will say a word about Collins’ situation, either on or off the record. It’s also something Collins is thinking about too. When he agreed to the two-year deal after the 2015 World Series, he said at that time he wasn’t sure he wanted to manage beyond 2017.

An anonymous rival executive reportedly told Heyman “It’s not his fault. If he had all those pitchers, it’d be a different story.”

Whether that’s the case or not, Collins doesn’t have those pitchers, and the backup cavalry, combined with the healthy field players, couldn’t pull enough wins together to save their manager’s job if this wasn’t his decision.

Collins brought the Mets to the World Series and two straight postseason appearances in 2015 and 2016, but his current contract is expiring after this season. Despite his recent successes, it makes sense that the Mets would choose this postseason to cut ties or that he would choose it to walk away from managing.

He’s 68 years old and has a 980-996 career record with three teams, so he will retire with a final career record below .500 but there’s an outside chance he could still reach 1,000 career wins before he rides off into the sunset and never has to deal with New York sports media ever again.

Update: The New York Daily News reports that the whisperings about Collins retiring have escalated and that,

“Team sources said privately they expect the 68-year-old to retire. Collins, however, reiterated again this week, he has not decided his own future.”

The Mets still haven’t made a decision on whether they’re going to gently push Collins into retirement with a dismissal yet, but more and more it looks like they won’t have to.