Terry Collins reached the postseason as a manager for the first time this season when he guided the Mets to the NL East title and then the franchise’s first World Series appearance since 2000.
He was rewarded with a two-year contract and on Tuesday, Collins will learn if he can add some hardware to his accomplishments when the National League Manager of the Year Award is announced.
Collins, in his fifth season at the helm with the Mets and 11th overall as a big league manager, has finished third in the voting twice — in 1994 with the Astros and in 1998 with the Angels.
This time, he’s up against the Cubs’ Joe Maddon and Mike Matheny of the Cardinals.
The award is voted on before the playoffs, so the team’s run to the World Series, where the Mets lost in five games to the Royals, won’t be a factor.
Instead, Collins will have to rely on having helped the Mets overcome a sluggish first half to rally past the Nationals for an unexpected division title.
In his previous four seasons in Queens, the Mets had not won more than 79 games before reaching the 90-win mark in 2015, propelled by the trade-deadline acquisition of Yoenis Cespedes from the Tigers.
It’s a turn of events that would have seemed unlikely in early July, when the Mets headed on a West Coast trip following a three-game losing streak that left them at .500, or even at the end of that month, as a devastating loss to the Padres at Citi Field looked to have left them for dead.
A day later, general manager Sandy Alderson acquired Cespedes, and that night Wilmer Flores — who nearly had been shipped to the Brewers for Carlos Gomez in a deal that fell through — hit a walk-off homer in the 12th inning to beat the Nationals for the first win of what became a three-game sweep.