Dear Terry Collins:

I understand that you want to be a football coach. Football coaches have all the power, after all. To misquote Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, there is nothing so much like God on earth as a football coach on the practice field. They get to make men many times larger than themselves run until they puke. They get to pontificate to a rapt media about their tactical brilliance. They get to call "voluntary" workouts and then cut the guys who actually understand the dictionary meaning of the word "voluntary".
You, on the other hand, had a shortstop show up on time for spring training. He did nothing wrong. He did nothing to get upset about. He simply did his job, and you, you chose to make An Issue out of it because, well, there's nothing else worth talking about in Mets camp, is there?
Look, Terry, I understand. You have a team with the deep potential to be terrible. Your best player left. Your second best player is undergoing the sort of power outage that usually goes with a flying saucer hovering over your car. Your best pitcher doesn't throw hard enough to break glass and nobody can pronounce your catcher's last name. And above it all lurks the high probability that you're going to have to hold bake sales in the concourses of Citi Field to make payroll this year, because your owners are in deeper financial dookie than the Greek government.
But really, Terry, taking it out on the kid in the media? Dragging it out long past the natural lifespan of the story? Isn't there anything, anything else at all you could be talking about? Or maybe you could just get down to getting a baseball team ready for spring, and not wish you were a football coach. At least, not quite so loudly.