WFAN’s time at Fanatics Fest rolled on Saturday with two of our legendary overnight turned midday hosts, Joe Benigno and Sal Licata, together in the Saturday morning slot usually occupied solo by Joe B. – but he didn’t just have Sal, he also had Terry Collins for a while!
Joe joked that Collins was “one of a select group that has taken my franchise to a World Series, but becoming a Mets fan in 1962 when I was nine years old, and it was one of the dumbest decisions I ever made – the only dumber one was becoming a Jets fan!”
Collins and Bobby Valentine, for a little trivia, are the only two managers to take the Mets to the playoffs in consecutive years, amazing for a team that has been to five World Series and won two…and it almost never had a chance to happen?
“I remember I just got the job my first year, it was maybe the first or second week when the season started, Joel Sherman walks in to me and he says, ‘you know, you do know you're hired just to get this straightened out and then they're gonna fire you get somebody else,’” Terry said. “I’d been there two weeks! So I said, ‘well, jobs are hard to get, there’s only 30 of them, so I’ll be here as long as I can.’”
That never bothered Terry, who even admits he listens to WFAN a lot and had asked Joe and Sal which one was going to rip him harder, but instead they wanted to talk about a few key Mets topics from Collins’ time in Queens – and perhaps the hardest to look back on was the fall of Matt Harvey.
“It broke my heart, because I know the injury issues – I really think the thoracic outlet syndrome surgery that he had really slowed his arm speed down and hurt him as a pitcher – but this guy was the best in the game,” Terry said. “In 2013, when he started that All-Star Game, I'm on the field talking to the guys and I was asking him who was the toughest guy they ever faced, and every single one of them said the guy who was pitching tonight. Carlos Beltran told me, he said, ‘Terry, I've faced everybody, and this guy's got the best stuff I've ever seen.’ Had the injuries not occurred, he’d be a Hall of Famer.”
And if you’re wondering why Terry kept Harvey in Game 5 of the World Series and let his bulldog eat, well, here’s the reason:
“Scott Boras had come out and said he’s only going to pitch 180 innings or whatever, and Matt was on board, so one day we’re playing the Yankees, and I take him out in the fifth inning with a two-hit shutout going,” Terry said. “The next day he walked into my office and said, ‘no more, gimme the baseball.’ And that’s why I sent him out there in Game 5. This guy’s competitiveness…when he was on the mound, this guy was the man, and he didn't care who you were getting in the batter's box.”
There was a ton of great stuff in Collins’ half-hour with the guys, so take a listen to it all above!