ATLANTA — There comes a time when you have to stop shrouding where you are by what you’ve done before, or what others have done before, or by how long the season is. After a while, none of that matters. After a while, there is only one question that matters.
Are you a good baseball team or not?
And right now, it is impossible to answer that question in the affirmative if you are a member of the New York Mets. They are officially no longer a winning team, that’s for certain, after they surrendered a three-run sixth-inning lead to the Braves on Tuesday night and quietly limped to the end of a 6-4 loss that dipped them back below .500 at 30-31.
Sixty-one games into a season is a fair enough moment to get a genuine read on a team. Yes, there’s a lot of baseball yet to be played. Yes, the mediocrity of the National League and expansion of the playoffs allow teams to buy into that whenever a losing streak spins the season sideways. Yes, yes, yes: other teams in the past few years have looked worse than the Mets do right now, and have wound up sipping champagne.
The comfort of the abstract only goes so far, though.
At some point, that is replaced by the reality of what you are seeing on the ballfield every day. Tuesday was the quintessential example of a team that simply can’t get out of its own way right now:
— The Mets got fine starting pitching — for five innings. But in the sixth, Carlos Carrasco walked Matt Olson to lead off and then on back-to-back pitches — double by Austin Riley, double by Sean Murphy — a 4-1 Mets lead was 4-3 and Truist Park was engaged and electric, and Buck Showalter all but sprinted to the mound to get Carrasco.
— Their biggest guns — Francisco Lindor, Pete Alonso — hit booming two-run home runs, but both of them — and all of the Mets’ significant offense — were contained to one inning, the third. In the other eight, the Mets never even mounted a serious threat. They amassed all of four hits on the night.
— When a relief pitcher could really have lent a huge lift, Drew Smith instead served up one of his specialties — a hanging slider — so instead of stranding Murphy at second in the sixth inning after he had gotten two outs, Smith gave up the lead on a booming double by Marcell Ozuna and then a hard-hit grounder by Orlando Arcia.
— By the time Jeff McNeil double-boxed a ball in the outfield that helped build Atlanta’s final run, it almost seemed exactly according to plan. At least the way the Mets have done it across this four-game losing streak that has wiped clean the good-feeling aura of that sweep of the Phillies last week.
“We have over a hundred games still,” Showalter said later. “I have confidence these guys will do things their history tells you they’ll do.”
In theory, sure.
In practice, the Mets are beginning to resemble a pricey car with a fickle engine. When it hums, it can be terrific. But some mornings, no matter how much you try, you can’t turn it over. The Mets have been playing middling (and worse) baseball for seven weeks now. The old Joe Torre staircase theory to building a solid season — get to .500; get five games over; get 10 over, then 15 and so on — sure feels out of their reach now.
And when the opponent is Atlanta — which seems to do well all the things the Mets struggle at — the problem is only exacerbated.
“We’re at the part of the year where it seems like we’re getting there,” Lindor said, “but then we never quite seem to get there.”
Remarkably, on the seventh and eighth of June, in the next two games, the Mets will hand the ball to co-aces Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander — one 38, one 40 — and ask them to deliver them a series win that suddenly seems like an important internal talking point less than two weeks in front of the first day of summer.
And they will ask them to do that with the knowledge that right now they can’t expect 6-7 runs of support, either. It’s a big ask.
But right now, so are these:
Are the Mets a good baseball team?
Can they become a good baseball team?
Will they keep spinning their wheels in the mud?
Take comfort in the calendar, still, if it gets you through the night. But at some point, the reality of the moment becomes the reality of a season. Right now it’s hard to argue that the Mets are any different than what we see in the moment.
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