During an otherwise awful night for the Mets, Terry Collins and David Wright got into a bit of a spat in the dugout that turned out to more or less embody what we like about both men. Patrick Flood has all the details and the interpretation.

For what it’s worth, David Wright seems like — understandably, and smartly — a pretty guarded guy, but absolutely every bit of evidence we have suggests he really, really loves playing baseball. Like even more than most professional baseball players. That’s awesome, and so is David Wright. Also, he’s hitting .408.

A couple weeks ago, I pointed out that you could isolate stretches of Wright’s merely good but not totally awesome 2009-2011 campaigns in which he fared as well as he had in his first 20 games of 2012. That’s still true: In 33 games from May 30 to July 5 of 2010, Wright posted a .414/.456/.662 line. And over a 38-game stretch from May 4-June 16, 2009, Wright hit .415/.503/.606. Maybe you could find another if you play around with the baseball-reference gamelogs. Which is to say, again, that this is a small sample size and maybe this is the best Wright will hit all season, and maybe he’ll go into an awful slump soon and people will start crying “traid” again.

But those are arbitrary endpoints, and there’s no arguing that it’s encouraging he’s started this season this way. Obviously.

Actually, here’s something funny: Wright has been so good in the first 33 games of this year that if you tack them on to the 102 games he played last year, it makes for a .291/.381/.470 line with a 139 OPS+, or a hell of a lot like vintage David Wright.  The power’s not where it was from 2005-2008, but that’s the case around the Majors.

As for Collins: The only blowback I’ve seen to his removal of Wright and Murphy from last night’s game is that it sends a negative message to the rest of the players if he’s only protecting his two best hitters. Yeah, whatever. Maybe they’ll see the type of treatment they’d get if they became one of the team’s best hitters.