NEW YORK -- When the White Sox arrived in Queens, fresh off a series win against baseball’s best team in the Braves, they had every reason to believe that they could continue on a run to start the second half of the season and remain in contention in a division that is still very much up for grabs.

The Mets (45-50) quickly put those hopes on hold, however, sending Chicago (40-57) to a 5-1 defeat on Wednesday night at Citi Field that sealed a series loss.

A White Sox offense that had found life after being shut out in the club’s second-half opener on Friday in Atlanta, scoring 24 runs over its next three games -- including 10 in a narrow loss to New York on Tuesday -- went quiet again on Wednesday.

“It’s a huge blow -- doesn’t matter who you just finished beating,” said manager Pedro Grifol. “Yesterday’s game, we had an opportunity to win. And today, we had that one bad inning and just couldn’t get anything going offensively.”

Matched up against a vintage Justin Verlander, the White Sox didn’t manage a hit until Andrew Benintendi led off the fourth inning with a line-drive single to center field, extending his hitting streak to seven games. They didn’t score a run until Luis Robert Jr. launched a solo homer to left-center with one out in the seventh. It was the slugger’s 28th dinger of the year, which ranks third in the Majors, behind only the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani (35) and the Braves’ Matt Olson (30).

Gavin Sheets was the only other White Sox player to notch a hit off Verlander, grounding a slow roller to the left side of the infield in the seventh that gave him enough time to reach base safely. The 40-year-old responded by striking out Carlos Pérez on four pitches, one of seven punchouts across eight sharp innings that gave Verlander his 23rd career win over Chicago, tied for his second most against a single opponent.

“Yeah, he had his good stuff tonight,” Sheets said. “He threw the ball well and he attacked us, attacked us in multiple different ways each at-bat. … We were all talking about how he’s attacking us, what he’s trying to do. It seemed like tonight, everybody had a little different story. He was attacking everybody individually.

“Credit to him. He had a good game plan and executed it well.”

Opposite Verlander was White Sox right-hander Touki Toussaint, who in his last outing -- a surprise relief appearance -- spared Chicago’s bullpen in the loss to Atlanta with 5 1/3 innings of one-run ball. He didn’t fare as well on Wednesday in his return to the rotation, allowing five runs on four hits and four walks in six frames. Though he traded zeros with Verlander at times, his start unraveled in a four-run fourth.

Toussaint let the Mets’ first two batters of the inning reach base on a walk and a hit-by-pitch, then gave up a run-scoring single to Francisco Alvarez, who stayed hot after his two-homer game on Tuesday. Another free pass later, Toussaint allowed three consecutive runs on a forceout, a sacrifice fly and a double to left off the bat of Brandon Nimmo. Toussaint got Tommy Pham to ground out to third base to put an end to the inning, but the damage was done.

“I was attacking guys, and then in that fourth … it kind of snowballed a little bit,” Toussaint said. “I think I need to do a better job of minimizing that and getting outs as quick as I can.”

With the White Sox bats reverting back to the form that plagued them for much of the season’s first half, Toussaint had little room for error. Sixteen of the 28 batters Chicago sent to the plate against Verlander made the walk back to the dugout after three pitches or fewer. That’s a trend the White Sox will need to correct in short order, considering that their next series is against the American League Central-leading Twins.

“Any time you score one run on a home run, what’s there to be crazy about?” Grifol said. “Those are things that we have to analyze and see what went on, see how many balls were out of the strike zone, how many were in the strike zone. If we were swinging at balls in the strike zone, good. And if we’re not, then we’ve got to get back to doing what we’ve been doing the last three or four days.”