SAN FRANCISCO -- Terry Collins, David Wright and briefly Curtis Granderson spoke during a pregame meeting Saturday imploring the club to remain positive despite recent losing.
The message: The Mets remain within striking distance of the division leaders, even though they are now on a five-game losing skid and own a 28-34 record. In fact, the Mets are only five games behind the NL East-leading Atlanta Braves.
"It's easy to play the woe-as-me card and get some negativity to creep up in here," Wright said. "And it wasn't so much a meeting, per se. It was kind of reminding everybody that we're four or five games out of first place. Going into tonight we were -- what? -- 4-5 on the road trip. So although we've played pretty poorly these last four or five days, overall on this road trip it's not the end of the world, and that our best baseball is ahead of us."
In light of his pregame comments, Wright added that he particularly lamented his sixth-inning throwing error led to two unearned runs in an eventual 5-4 loss to the San Francisco Giants on Saturday night.
"I wish that personally I could have gone out there and played a better game," the captain said. "It's easy to kind of point fingers at some of the things that happened later in the game. But we had a play to get out of an inning and cut off their momentum and I made bonehead play and feel poorly about that."
Said Anthony Recker about the meeting's message: "There's been a little bit of negativity that's gone around recently, because we've lost a couple, from the outside. Just not to let it affect us. We're a pretty damn good team. We haven't played our best. And we're a couple of games under .500 and four or five games out in the standings. Just stay positive and things will turn around."
