Mets know 'sloppy' play is halting any momentum -- but can they fix it?

SEATTLE -- For the Mets, the same old problems keep arising. The issues that surfaced throughout the first third of the season are not disappearing.

Foremost among them is run prevention -- that buzzy, two-word phrase that became a flash point when president of baseball operations David Stearns named it his No. 1 priority heading into last offseason. Run prevention -- i.e. pitching and defense -- was a problem for the Mets last season. It remains a problem this year, as evidenced throughout Tuesday’s 8-3 loss to the Mariners at T-Mobile Park.

“We didn’t play well,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “We didn’t pitch well, didn’t make a couple of plays behind our pitching staff. It was just sloppy.”

The game was still tied when Marcus Semien and Mark Vientos committed fielding errors on back-to-back plays with one out in the third inning, with each of them unable to corral a line drive. Mendoza was far more critical of Vientos’ error, which he called a “routine play,” than Semien’s, which included both a dropped liner and a rushed, errant throw to first.

Although those blunders resulted in only one run, the right side of New York’s infield was not done leaking.

In the fifth inning, Vientos could not field a Cole Young chopper that glanced off his glove. Nor could pitcher Jonah Tong pick up his teammate. Three batters later, Jhonny Pereda hit a three-run homer to transform a close game into a blowout.

“That one took a bad hop,” Vientos said of Young’s ground ball. “I thought I put a good glove on it, and it took a bad hop.”

If not for Carson Benge’s two homers -- his first career multihomer game -- the final score would have been even more lopsided. As it was, the Mets committed two errors (in addition to Vientos’ second miscue), while Tong allowed five runs (four earned) over 3 1/3 innings, needing 83 pitches to record just 10 outs. He blamed a lack of fastball command for his inefficiency.

The night played host, in other words, to the same old story for a team unable to register any sort of momentum. Every time the Mets seem to gain some, as they did with a sweep of the Marlins back home last weekend, they siphon it all away through a combination of inefficient starting pitching, sloppy defensive play and an utter lack of hitting. This has been their habit since the early days of April.

"I think that’s just baseball,” Vientos said. “Especially right now, there’s so much talent. There are so many good teams. You could sweep a team, and then you could get swept. But our job is to prevent that, prevent it as much as possible and just get on a hot streak and stay hot. It’s tough. We’re all working. We’re all pushing. From the coaching staff to all the players, we’ve been pushing.”

Overall, the Mets have been a solid enough defensive team, entering Tuesday’s play tied for sixth in the Majors in Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) and tied for 20th in Outs Above Average (OAA), two of the league’s most respected defensive metrics. Much of that is due to positive contributions from Francisco Lindor, who is injured, backup catcher Luis Torrens, and rookies A.J. Ewing and Benge. Many other Mets regulars have produced negative totals in either (or both) DRS and OAA, including Semien, Vientos and Bo Bichette.

The eye test tells a similar story.

"There’s been stretches where we’ve been playing well defensively,” Mendoza said, “and then there’s been stretches where we’re making errors on routine plays.”

It has cost their pitchers runs and has cost the team games, and it’s beginning to get dangerously late for anyone with designs on fixing it. By week’s end, the Mets (26-35) will be more than 40 percent of the way through their season. If the same old problems keep arising, they’ll be too far behind in the standings for the second half to matter.

Asked directly if he thinks it’s too late for his team, Mendoza replied: “I don’t think so.”

"But we’ve got to start playing better -- that’s the bottom line,” he said. “Until we start playing consistent baseball, that’s the only way to get out of it.”