Mets suffer latest ugly disaster to Nationals as nightmare start hits new low
It’s official: The Mets are the worst team in baseball.
And on Wednesday, especially, they looked the part.
Five weeks into the season and with a sky-high payroll, the mismatched disaster that is the Mets roster was overmatched again in a 14-2 loss to the lowly Nationals at Citi Field that wasn’t as close as the score might indicate.
“We have to be better,” Carlos Mendoza said after his team’s 16th loss in 19 games. “There’s no excuses. It’s been a long period of time here that we’re not playing well. We’ve got to fix it.”
Whether that’s even possible is a serious question.
With their latest defeat, when they allowed a season high in runs, the Mets fell to 10-20.
That’s a half-game behind their NL East rivals, the Phillies, who were rained out and remained 10-19.
The weather was not as kind to the Mets faithful, as a few thousand masochists stuck around on a miserable, wet night in Queens to watch … what, exactly?
David Peterson delivered his latest awful start, as the lefty’s ERA as a starter jumped to 8.10 after allowing seven runs in just 3 ²/₃ innings.
Another rotation castoff, Sean Manaea, was called upon to replace Peterson and gave up a grand slam in the fourth.
And the offense, which briefly awoke during a seven-run fourth inning in Tuesday’s win, went back to its typical ineptness against Washington right-hander Cade Cavalli.
The lone exception to the collapse was Juan Soto, who looked to be in peak form.
He homered in a second straight game and added a single and a double.
But as everyone from Mendoza to David Stearns to Soto himself has said, even Soto can’t carry the team by himself.
The Mets, though, apparently wanted to test that theory against the Nationals, as Soto — serving as the DH again as he deals with left forearm discomfort — provided just about the only positives for a Mets team that’s now dropped four of five.
And there are five months to go.
“The challenge is coming back tomorrow with a good attitude, a good mindset, work hard and try to take care of tomorrow’s game,’’ Peterson said. “It’s easy to let things compound. It’s easy to get caught up in it, but the only way to get out of it is to take it one day at a time and attack and win tomorrow.”
As Mendoza said before the game: “We’ve got to play better baseball, period. Regardless of who we’re playing, we’ve got to start winning series. We haven’t been able to do that for a long period of time now.”
And they may have even made it harder on themselves Wednesday during their rare win Tuesday, when Mendoza went to Tobias Myers — who has pitched well out of the bullpen — for two innings with an eight-run lead.
So the right-hander was unavailable to either open for Peterson — who started because Washington had two left-handers among their top four hitters — or take over for him in the fourth.
Honestly, it’s hard to fathom any combination of pitchers or position players — short of cloning Soto — would have helped the Mets on Wednesday.
An announced crowd of 32,624 — and fortunately, not nearly that many actually showed up — made its displeasure known throughout the latest defeat.
As there has been with alarming frequency this season at Citi Field, the booing could be heard at some point during nearly every inning.
With five months to go in what’s already been an interminable season, the Mets surely have hit rock bottom.
But as they’ve proven consistently so far this year, there’s apparently always lower to go.
