The two guys at 1-2 in the Mets batting order right now -- Jeff McNeil, Pete Alonso -- might be the biggest reasons that the Mets aren’t even closer to last place in the National League East than they are. McNeil got three more hits on Friday as the Mets beat the Cubs at Wrigley Field. Alonso hit his 25th home run at Wrigley the day before. The Mets’ rookie home run record is 26, and belongs to Darryl Strawberry. Alonso will likely blow through that by the time Major League Baseball gets to Cleveland for the 2019 All-Star Game.

McNeil? He continues to do what he has done since he began his career in professional baseball: Hit for average. He was at .341 after Friday’s game. Since he came up to the big leagues last summer, there is one player in the sport who has a higher batting average than McNeil’s .335: Christian Yelich. McNeil hits like an All-Star no matter where he plays in the field, second base or left field or even right for the first time on Friday.

Alonso ought to be in the T-Mobile Home Run Derby in Cleveland. But there also ought to be a place for him on the NL team if he has 30 home runs by the All-Star break. The 24-year old Alonso is one of the breakout stars of the baseball season, a season that began with him being no sure thing to make it north with the Mets from Port St. Lucie. Coming into the weekend only Yelich -- that guy, again -- had more home runs this season than Alonso.

And McNeil will probably end up watching the All-Star Game presented by Mastercard on television even if he is still hitting over .340 by the break, or even higher than that. Maybe there should be a place on the ballot for throwback hitters, ones who hit the ball where it is pitched and spray it all over the ballpark no matter how teams are defending him, or where he is in the count. On Friday, McNeil won the game with another two-strike hit. In the world of exit velocity and launch angle, the player known as “Squirrel” continues to be a joy to watch.

The starting rotation for the Mets was supposed to carry the team. Has not. The batting order was supposed to organize itself around Robinson Cano. And has not, mostly because Cano has sometimes looked softer than soft ice cream even when healthy. The bullpen, even with closer Edwin Diaz arriving at Citi Field with Cano, has been a mess. Now the Mets have fired pitching coach Dave Eiland and replaced him with Phil Regan, who at 82 has been around baseball long enough to have faced Ted Williams.

And if you think manager Mickey Callaway is a sure thing to make it to the end of the season, despite multiple votes of confidence from general manager Brodie Van Wagenen, raise a hand. Since an 11-1 start last season, Callaway’s record with the Mets going into Saturday’s game was 22 games under .500. Since a solid 10-6 start this season that made them look like players in the NL East, the Mets are 26-34.

Day after day, though, McNeil hits and Alonso keeps hitting home runs. McNeil played second last year. The Mets traded for Cano. Jed Lowrie, who still hasn’t shown up at Citi Field because of injury, was signed to play third base. McNeil eventually ended up in left field, before playing his first game in right against the Cubs and even making a fine catch in front of the ivy against Kris Bryant.

When he was asked on SNY after the game about the RBI single that put the Mets ahead of the Cubs 5-4, McNeil said this:

“Found the barrel, found a hole, took the lead.”

Then he said: “There’s a lot of holes out there. Hit ‘em hard, they’ll get through.”

He is 27 years old. It’s worth mentioning again that he’s never been the kind of phenom in his career that Alonso has become this year for the Mets. All he has ever done is hit. And he really might be the .350 hitter in the NL who doesn’t make the NL All-Star team.

Alonso ought to be on that team somewhere, even with all the other first basemen ahead of him in the voting right now. He is on his way to being Rookie of the Year. He is hitting rookie home runs at the same rate Cody Bellinger, one of the stars of the sport this season, did when he first came up with the Dodgers. And he came into Saturday’s games with the same number of home runs that Bellinger has for the Dodgers, and four fewer than Yelich. It was pointed out the other day that before this season the most home runs a rookie Met had ever hit before the All-Star break was Ron Swoboda’s 15 back in 1965.

If Alonso keeps going like this, he will hit more home runs this season than any Met ever has (team record is 41, shared by Todd Hundley and Carlos Beltran). What he’s doing, and what McNeil is doing, too often gets lost as the Mets somehow try to keep this from becoming another lost season. So much has gone wrong for the Mets as we move up on July. For now, though, the right stuff at the top of the order is keeping their team away from the bottom of the NL East.