MILWAUKEE — There can be a certain beauty to running in place. To standing tall, minimizing your damage, while others falter.
Or, if you are the Mets of the moment, running in place can seem nastier than a corduroy vest in 90-degree weather.
Thanks to arguably their worst-played game of the season Sunday afternoon, a 5-3 loss to the Brewers at Miller Park, the Mets headed home with a 5-5 record on their road trip through Miami, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee. In a vacuum, that’s not awful. Yet they had to settle for 5-5 after dropping the last two to the rebuilding Brewers — this finale in the wake of their manager Terry Collins feeling ill and departing to undergo tests at a nearby hospital — and in doing so, they lost more ground to their resurgent rivals in Washington.
“Ten-day road trips are hard. Our guys get tired at the end,” said Mets bench coach Dick Scott, who replaced Collins as the manager. “I’m sure everybody in the league gets tired. We’ll take a 5-5. We had a chance to do a little bit better, but I think all in all, we’ll take it.”
While Collins was admitted overnight to nearby Froedtert Hospital — Mets assistant general manager John Ricco said he didn’t believe the level of concern about Collins was high — his players looked tired, disheveled, distracted … take your pick. Maybe they were shaken by the news of Collins’ hospitalization that Scott delivered in a team meeting about 30 minutes prior to first pitch. It would make for as good an explanation as any for their three errors (one each by Alejandro De Aza, losing pitcher Steven Matz and Wilmer Flores, who could have been charged with a second miscue) tying a season high for one game.
“The guys are human. It may have,” Scott said, in addressing whether Collins’ sudden exit from the ballpark led to the sloppiness. “As you saw, after early in the game, we could’ve phoned the rest of the game in but we continued to play.”
This is true; the Mets wound up making it close and interesting, the Brewers turning to closer Jeremy Jeffress for a third straight day, and that speaks highly of these injury-riddled Mets. However, in this year’s National League East, you get no points just for sticking around. While the Mets went 5-5 in their tour of the Southeast and Midwest, the Nationals went 6-3, picking up a game and a half. Dusty Baker’s group, at 39-24, holds a 4 ½-game lead over Collins’ Mets (34-28), matching the 2015 Mets’ deepest hole under Washington.
With Neil Walker (lower back) out and Michael Conforto (wrist) and Asdrubal Cabrera in need of a day off, Collins wrote out a lineup featuring No. 2 hitter Matt Reynolds and cleanup man Kelly Johnson before he fell ill. Everyone together now: Yeesh. When the Mets failed to cash in on a bases-loaded, one-out situation in the top of the first, with James Loney striking out on three pitches and Flores flying out to center field, it didn’t feel far from there to a 5-0 deficit.
A 4 ½-game deficit doesn’t feel terribly far, and this upcoming homestand offers safe-landing potential: The Pirates are more injury-plagued than the Mets and have lost five straight, the Braves are awful and the defending champion Royals have bobbed up and down. Shoot, the Pirates’ current skid began last Wednesday, when the Mets posted arguably their best win of the season, 6-5 over the Bucs at PNC Park.
“Besides one stretch early in the year, we haven’t really put everything together, and we’re still sitting right where we are,” Scott said. “I think that’s probably why guys are still encouraged by everything.”
There’s no need to sound the alarms. The Mets can use their off day to hope to hear good news about Collins. Nevertheless, this win-now group, 7-9 in its last 16 games, has to start winning more. Now. By running in place, they’ve run behind.