Trying to make sense of Mets' recent funk

The Mets lost again on Wednesday night, their fifth loss in a row, the second night in a row the Braves came back from being 4-1 down to beat them. The Mets’ record is now 30-32 as they face the 100-game season between now and Oct. 1.

They are 16-25 since they came back from their West Coast trip on April 23. It’s as if the dark air afflicting New York City had followed them all the way to Atlanta. Considering the expectations they brought with them from last season’s 101-win campaign to this one, they are as much of a disappointment in the National League East as the Phillies, a World Series team that is a half-game worse than the Mets at 29-32.

In addition to losing again on Wednesday night, they saw Pete Alonso, their best player right now, get hit on the left wrist by a Charlie Morton pitch and leave the game. The X-rays turned out to be negative, and he is listed as being day to day. Later, they held their collective breath when Francisco Lindor collided with Tommy Pham in short left field. Lindor picked himself up, got back up and stayed in the game.

It didn’t help the Mets. Hardly anything does right now. On Tuesday night, Alonso and Lindor, their stars, both hit two-run homers. But then the Braves knocked Carlos Carrasco out in the sixth inning, took the lead there and kept it. When asked about the game getting away from Carrasco and then Drew Smith in the sixth, manager Buck Showalter quietly said, “We got four hits.” Sometimes it seems when Alonso isn’t scaring the other team, no one is.

On Wednesday, the Mets once again jumped out to a 4-1 lead, did that with Max Scherzer on the mound. And you thought that maybe, just maybe, they would end the losing streak and start to look like last season again. But the Braves got two off Scherzer in the fifth and came back with two more in the sixth, knocking Scherzer from the game. They finally won, 7-5, and the Mets were now 10 games worse at this point in the season than they were a year ago.

There are reasons and there are excuses in sports. Showalter talks about that all the time, and it’s always a tricky business for the manager of a team in trouble, because the reasons end up sounding like excuses, and that’s never been in Showalter’s baseball DNA.

“We’re a little snakebit right now,” Showalter said after Wednesday’s loss, and he was hoping that they would get better out of their other ace, Justin Verlander, than they did from Scherzer.

Of course, the Mets know where the Phillies were around this time last season, before they turned everything around and did make the World Series. They know that the Braves were 29-33 after 62 games in ’21, and ended up winning it all. But none of that is helping a Mets team that is nothing close to being the best team owner Steve Cohen’s money can buy.

So, what are the reasons this is happening to Showalter’s team?

1. Only Alonso, out of all Showalter’s regulars from a year ago, is playing better than he did in 2022. Lindor, who does have 11 homers and 42 RBIs, is hitting .216. Brandon Nimmo, who started out so hot, is now batting .284 and has just four homers. Neither Mark Canha nor Starling Marte are close to being the players they were a year ago.
2. There has been a profound trickle-down effect on the Mets' bullpen without Edwin Díaz, who tore up his knee in the World Baseball Classic and won’t be back until September at the earliest. David Robertson, who was supposed to be Showalter’s guy for the seventh and eighth, is now the closer. Adam Ottavino, who was supposed to set up Robertson before Robertson set up Díaz, has been a disappointment, and he gave up a crushing homer to Michael Harris II in the eighth on Wednesday.

3. Scherzer’s numbers are respectable enough. He is 5-2 with a 3.71 ERA and struck out 10 against the Braves. But he wasn’t good enough on Wednesday, when the Mets needed him to pitch like an ace.
4. They are getting little out of Brett Baty and Eduardo Escobar at third base. Daniel Vogelbach has done next to nothing and is at .203 with just two homers. Jeff McNeil, the 2022 batting champion, is down to .277 and has just one extra-base hit over the past 30 days.
5. Last year, the Mets came back all the time. They started to do that against the Rays a couple of weeks ago. Now the Braves beat them late the way the Blue Jays beat them late in New York last weekend.

It was Bill Parcells, Showalter’s old friend, who famously said you are what your record says you are. The Mets are two games under .500. Still a long way to go. It won’t matter if the Mets aren’t a lot better over the next 100 than they have been over the first 62. The snakebit team needs to start biting back.