#news Mets’ New Manager Has Plenty of Friends in Buffalo

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: November 23, 2010

It never hurts when looking into an audience of hard-core skeptics to also see the smiling faces of true believers, of people who go back with you more than two decades and who would board a plane on a day’s notice to endorse you with insights that few others could have.

Small wonder Terry Collins made a point of thanking Robert and Mindy Rich for making it from Buffalo to New York on the day he introduced himself as the 20th manager of the Mets with the mischievous declaration, “I’m not the evil devil that people made me out to be.”

Evil devil or evil doer, this was not the man Robert Rich remembered from their plane ride home after a crushing defeat in the decisive fifth game of a 1991 championship series when Collins was managing for the Rich-owned Buffalo Bisons of the International League.

“We had won the first two games in Buffalo and then went out to Denver and lost three in a row,” Rich said. “Terry cried on the flight home to the point where I cried with him. That’s an example of the passion he has for what he does and the effect he can have on people.”

You might think that a man who owns and operates a $3 billion frozen food company would be more likely to befriend guys named Wilpon or Steinbrenner than to relish a friendship with a 61-year-old baseball lifer who never played a big league inning and whose interests seldom stray far outside the lines.

“He’d come to the ballpark early every day — and I mean hours early — and we’d go for a run and talk about baseball,” Rich said. “After a while, I would try to steer the conversation to something else. Terry would get a little quiet and then, before you knew it, we were back to talking about the game. I’m telling you, this man has a love for this like no one I’ve ever met.”

Excuse them for not discussing cures for cancer or third-world hunger, but at the time Collins was managing for the Riches they all had a bad case of baseball on the brain. The food folks were trying to turn Buffalo into a major league city, having christened a downtown ballpark in 1988 that was built by HOK Sport, the retro geniuses of Camden Yards fame.

The plans for expanding the charming park were part of the push for a National League team, as was — in Robert Rich’s mind — having Collins as the face of a fledgling franchise.

“I never said this to him — or anyone, really — but that’s what I was thinking,” Robert Rich said. “Because in the three years that Terry managed for us, he became an icon in Buffalo. People there loved him because you could feel his energy and commitment. We drew a million fans every year, more than some major league teams.”

When the expansion derby concluded in 1993, Buffalo lost out to bigger television markets, South Florida and Denver. Collins by then had moved on, joining the ranks of major league managers in 1994.

The rest of his decade — five second-place finishes in Houston and Anaheim, one fourth-place finish in Anaheim and departures in both places that didn’t cause clubhouse rioting — became the basis for questioning whether Collins was too strident for a team that has made a habit of quitting on managers, as well as on itself.

“I don’t think there’s a groundswell for bringing Mo Vaughn back to New York, so I don’t think Terry will have any problems,” Rich said, referring to the former Mets first baseman who set off a firestorm in Anaheim and supposedly cost Collins the clubhouse.

Lending a woman’s depth, Mindy Rich said: “I would look at what happened in Anaheim the way I would look at someone else’s marriage — who knows what’s really happening inside? And then, as Terry said, he’s probably mellowed. What I would say about him is that he is as transparent as can be. What you see is what you get.”

Collins looked jumpy to start Tuesday’s news conference at Citi Field, but he settled down, showed a sense of humor (he wears No. 10 in honor of Jim Leyland, a mentor, and because, he said, his wife “thinks I’m a 10”). He promised to create a culture that would honor fundamentals, sounding much like Willie Randolph five years ago, only more hyperbolic. He called the current Mets “the finest group of young men I’ve ever met.”

Much has been made of Collins’s absence from the dugout since 1999, as if the rules of baseball have been rewritten. But he has since worked in player development for the Dodgers, managed in Japan, coached the Chinese national team in the World Baseball Classic and been minor league field coordinator for the Mets. Like Bobby Valentine, Collins apparently has some out-of-the-box adventurism in him, which is all good.

And it is, in all likelihood, no coincidence that he landed the big downstate job two years after the Buffalo Bisons became the Mets’ International League affiliate and one year after Collins joined the organization.

Robert Rich said he was not consulted this month by Sandy Alderson, the new general manager, but was coy on whether he had anything to do with connecting Collins with the Mets last year.

“We always talk,” he said of his partners, Fred and Jeff Wilpon. The moral of the story is that it never hurts to have old friends in high, upstate places, especially when they consider you the perfect managerial 10.

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