Sports

Mets have reached a very dangerous point in their season

WASHINGTON — Despite appearances, the Mets actually have been quite fortunate so far. They have yet to play an extended stretch of inspired ball, have spent most of the past two weeks under .500, yet because the NL East is living way down to expectations they are somehow not sitting in a sink hole, still only 3 ½ games behind the Phillies in third place.

This, though, might be the moment we all look back on in a couple of weeks, ruefully shake our heads, and declare: “That’s where it all started to get away.”

The 7-6 loss the Nationals slapped on them Thursday afternoon was bad enough. It meant another lost series for the Mets, who faced neither Max Scherzer nor Stephen Strasburg yet still couldn’t step on the Nats’ vulnerable necks. There was a feel-good ninth-inning rally that closed a three-run lead to one, and then a buzz-kill ending when Keon Broxton swung right through a couple of straight, hittable fastballs from a reeling Sean Doolittle.





It’s the last portion of that paragraph that is most troubling. Broxton was only up because Michael Conforto’s head had collided with Robinson Cano’s shoulder four innings earlier, dropping Conforto as easily as a Mike Tyson tomato can from back in the 1980s. The ensuing face-plant was all you really needed to know. That’s a concussion.

And that’s going to cost Conforto at least a seven-day stay on the concussion injured list, just at a time when he had caught fire. It was his three-run homer in the third that had given the Mets new life and drawn them even at 4-4 after Zack Wheeler had staked the Nats to a 4-0 lead.





“I hit him pretty hard,” Cano said sheepishly, shrugging his shoulders.

On a day that had already seen Jeff McNeil leave the game with tightness in his abdomen, the Mets didn’t need Michael Conforto to walk off the field looking like Michael Spinks.

“Someone else will have to step up,” Mets manager Mickey Callaway said, which is just about the only thing he could say. “When you lose somebody, someone has to step up and get the job done.”

In what passed for great news on a grisly day, it doesn’t appear, at least for now, that McNeil’s issue is too alarming. McNeil has had four sports-hernia surgeries and the scar tissue sometimes acts up. He missed a game earlier this year because of it (though the Mets weren’t as specific about it that time).





“It usually takes me a day,” McNeil said, insisting he won’t need an MRI exam. “It’s not something I’m worried about.”

What ought to worry the Mets is life without Conforto, who despite suffering through three empty weeks not long ago still has an OPS of .926. Concussions can be funny things. The Mets once lost Ryan Church for a couple of months — though they’ve apparently learned their lesson, opting for a train ride back to New York for Conforto instead of a plane ticket to Miami. Jason Bay suffered two of them, in 2010 and 2012, and was never remotely the same player.

Those are worst-case scenarios, of course, but the Mets are — or should be, anyway — conditioned to anticipate those. In the immediate, it creates a crater in the middle of the Mets lineup that Broxton certainly can’t fill; it’s almost certain that either Carlos Gomez or Rajai Davis, both playing well at Syracuse, will get a shot. The J.D. Davis left-field experiment probably gets kicked into high gear. And while the Mets are reluctant to start giving Dominic Smith outfield reps, they shouldn’t be.





Because it really doesn’t matter that the calendar insists there is still three-quarters of a season left; the Mets are entering an urgent phase. That’s what was aggravating about their unwillingness to take advantage of last Sunday’s rain delay and aggressively realign the rotation, which would’ve allowed Jacob deGrom to pitch Thursday.

The first five games of this stretch against losing teams (whether you use an asterisk when calling the Nats that or not) has yielded a 3-2 record. There are 10 more games to follow against the Marlins, Nats and Tigers before the Mets hit the road for a Memorial Day series with the Dodgers. If they’re lucky, Conforto will be clear to fly by then. If they’re fortunate, they will nudge themselves a few games over .500 by then.

Maybe the other teams in the East will be as generous as they’ve been a while longer. But the Mets probably shouldn’t bet on that. You can only rely so much on the kindness of strangers.





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