Mets believe they're close, but they're actually a flawed team

PHILADELPHIA – Dom Smith views the Mets, now a season-high 10 games back in the NL East and a season-worst six games below .500, as a team oh so close to turning it around.

They’re a team that just needs a ball like the one Jeff McNeil hit in the eighth inning of Tuesday’s 7-5 loss to the Phillies to actually clear the wall and tie the game.

McNeil hit a rocket that just missed going over the guardrail on top of the right-field wall, with the ball instead touching a fan’s glove just below the top of the rail.

Instead of a game-tying blast, the Mets had to settle for a double, and they ultimately stranded two runners that inning.

“We still feel we can turn this thing around,” Smith said. “We’re in a lot of games. It takes one little thing to go our way and bounce our way for us to go on a roll. We’re not sitting here getting our butts kicked every night. We’re playing good baseball. We’re in a lot of games. We’re one bounce away from things going our way.”

For all of Smith’s optimism, though, the reality is the Mets are a team that isn’t just one bounce away. They’re a flawed team that needs way too much to go right to win. There seems to always been one cog in the engine that is off — usually the flammable bullpen — and that cog takes down the ship.

They have moments when they can look elite. Moments when it all clicks.

Yet, there are too many games like Tuesday when they seem on the verge of winning yet still end up losing, often in frustrating fashion.

Spot starter Walker Lockett managed to take a 5-2 lead into the sixth inning before he put two on with one out.

The first runner scored on a groundout. The second on an infield single by Cesar Hernandez that the Mets had no chance to convert.

“It hurts a little bit when you make a pitch and you get a ground ball and for whatever reason it goes somewhere where you can’t get an out,” Mets manager Mickey Callaway said. “That takes the wind out of your sails a little bit.”

A good team finds a way to not that let moment snowball, but the Mets have not shown the ability to prevent back-breaking moments.

If anything, they specialize in suffering crushing blows.

Wilmer Font then served up a two-run homer to Maikel Franco that put the Phillies ahead, 6-5, and Brad Miller followed with a solo shot that doubled the Phillies’ lead.

The Mets’ leaky bullpen, which owns a 7.44 ERA this month, is the biggest reason why this team can’t get on a roll.

No lead is ever safe with this unit, which has vastly underachieved. A bad bullpen can derail a season, and this bullpen is tanking the season,

Twice in the last three days the Mets held a lead in the sixth inning or later and squandered it before closer Edwin Diaz could even enter.

Diaz has thrown 12 pitches in 10 days.

“We have enough talent that it will even out. It’s got to be better than it’s been,” Callaway said. “That’s the law of averages, but it hasn’t been and that’s tough.”

The Mets still had chances in the eighth and ninth innings, but the offense couldn’t deliver the clutch hit.

After McNeil’s eighth-inning double put runners at second and third with two outs, Hector Neris retired Mets’ rookie phenom Pete Alonso on a foul pop out.

Neris worked out of another jam in the ninth, and the Mets have now lost 28 of their last 40 road games. They have not won a road series in their last 13 tries.

When you add it all up, it produces this frustrating, inconsistent team. The starting pitching is not good enough to carry the team. The offense is good, not great. The bullpen is dreadful. The defense is just as bad. They can’t win on the road.

The Mets can hang in there with teams and push them to the end, but those traits often leave them hoping for that one bounce that often doesn’t come.

“Today was definitely frustrating for me, came so close to tying it up right there,” McNeil said. “It just didn’t go our way. Hopefully it starts to go our way.”