NEW YORK -- It may not be easy for the Mets to continue finding daily starts for Andrés Giménez. But during a season in which much has gone wrong for the Mets, the team’s best chance at rallying would seem to require Giménez in the lineup every day.

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The Mets’ do-everything rookie infielder tripled and scored the team’s only run in a 2-1 defeat to the Nationals on Tuesday at Citi Field, which otherwise featured the same situational hitting woes as nearly every other New York loss this season. The Mets stranded seven runners on base, bringing their league-leading total to 148 in 18 games.

One batter who didn’t strand anyone was Giménez, who added plenty of fine defensive work to his offensive contributions. In the fifth and eighth innings, Giménez and Luis Guillorme turned a pair of slick 4-6-3 double plays on Trea Turner, who had never previously hit into multiple double plays in a game. Giménez added a diving stop to rob Juan Soto of a single in the sixth inning, then showed off his range tracking down a popup in foul ground in the seventh.

Afterward, manager Luis Rojas strayed from his previous statements that the Mets wouldn’t necessarily look to put strong defensive alignments behind contact-oriented starting pitcher Rick Porcello.

“It definitely gets you thinking of more playing time for those guys, that combination,” Rojas said of Giménez and Guillorme. “Those guys are really good up the middle.”

The defensive alignment mirrored one the Mets used last week behind Porcello, who responded with his finest start of the season. That night, the Mets had no choice, with Amed Rosario, Jeff McNeil and Robinson Canó all nursing injuries. Five days later, a stomach bug knocked Rosario out of the starting lineup, which prompted the Mets to shift Giménez to shortstop and insert Guillorme at second.

With that as his backdrop, Porcello allowed a hailstorm of hard contact in the first two innings, including a Turner leadoff homer and a Victor Robles RBI bloop single. But once Porcello settled into a groove, Giménez and Guillorme responded with strong defense behind him.

“It’s always fun to play with someone that plays defense similar to you,” said Guillorme, who has long been considered one of the organization’s finest defenders.

Of particular note was the second of New York’s three double plays. Scooping up a Turner grounder a few feet to his left, Guillorme made a backhand flip to Giménez, who slid across the bag and fired to first just in time to nab Turner. The Nationals shortstop had reached an elite sprint speed of 31 feet per second on his dash down the line. It didn’t matter.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a double play turned that quick in the big leagues,” Porcello said. “They were lightning fast on that.”

Porcello added that having such defense behind him “gives you a lot of confidence to attack the zone, induce contact, induce weak contact. … You’re not worried about pitching for the swing-and-miss because these guys are gobbling everything up behind you.”

He’s not the only one who’s taken notice.

Given his offensive potential, Giménez -- whose 1-for-4 performance brought his average down to .293 -- has garnered calls for more playing time, though he isn’t likely to unseat Rosario as the starting shortstop anytime soon. Mets officials are not thrilled with Rosario’s approach at the plate, considering his zero walks and .207 on-base percentage; Rojas went as far as to talk to him about those issues in a private meeting on Tuesday afternoon. But the team has way too much invested in Rosario, who showed significant offensive and defensive growth in the second half last season, to bench him in favor of a rookie who has played just 17 games.

A more relevant question may be what the Mets should do with Canó when he returns from the injured list -- something that could happen as soon as Friday. Canó was batting .412 when he landed on the IL, but he had shown enough defensive regression that Rojas was routinely replacing him late in games with Giménez. If Canó slumps at all with the bat, the calls for Giménez to become a starter will grow only louder.

Those decisions will come in time, even as the implications of each Rojas lineup loom larger in a 60-game season. As Porcello noted, “It’s one of those years where it’s early, but it’s not.”

“We’re creeping up on almost the halfway point of the season,” Porcello said of the last-place Mets, “and we really need to get going.”