NEW YORK -- At some point, it’s too late to say it’s early.

For ages, Memorial Day weekend has served as a milepost on the Major League Baseball calendar -- a time to take stock of the sport’s landscape once the dust has settled from any early-season oddities. Approximately one-third of the schedule has been played. From here on out, the conventional wisdom goes, the standings begin to matter.

If that’s the case -- if, around the baseball world, it’s time to check in on where things stand -- there may be no bigger surprise than the one in San Diego. And not in a particularly good way.

The Padres, after a much-hyped offseason, sit at 24-29, fourth place in the National League West and unable to build any measure of momentum to turn things around. They had won four of five entering the weekend and appeared to be on their way. Then, they dropped consecutive games at Yankee Stadium, including a dispiriting 10-7 loss to New York in Sunday’s series finale.

Staked to an early lead, Yu Darvish was roughed up in the third inning. He allowed six runs on seven hits in the frame, and seven runs overall. Since last April, Darvish had completed five innings in every start. On Sunday, he couldn't complete three.

So what’s gone wrong for the Padres? Well, all of it, really.

When they’ve pitched, they haven’t hit. When they’ve hit, they haven’t pitched. Typically, it’s been the former. But on the occasions that they’ve put it all together -- like Friday night's 5-1 win over the Yankees -- they haven’t been able to build on it.

“I wish I had an answer for you,” said Padres manager Bob Melvin. “Hopefully, there was some progress with today. We were down like that, and we continued to have good at-bats and we ended up scoring some runs.”

On Sunday, the underperforming San Diego offense plated six runs off Yankees ace Gerrit Cole. The Padres had their own ace (one of them, at least) on the mound, and it still wasn’t enough.

Jake Cronenworth went deep off Cole in the top of the first inning, turning around a 99 mph fastball and sending it to the short-porch area in right field. In the bottom of the inning, Aaron Judge answered with a homer of his own.

San Diego took another lead in the second, when José Azocar turned an RBI single into a Little League home run after two Yankees errors. But, again, Darvish couldn’t hold that lead, coming unraveled in the third.

“It seems like everything happened so fast,” Darvish said through Japanese interpreter Shingo Horie. “Obviously, I’m trying to adjust out there, but I think their offense had the upper hand today.”

If there was a positive to be gleaned from Sunday’s loss, it was the resilience of the offense. Too often this season, when the Padres have found themselves in a hole, they’ve merely stayed there. This time, they nearly clawed their way out of it. Rougned Odor launched a two-run homer in the seventh. San Diego plated two more runs on an Azocar RBI groundout and Brett Sullivan’s sacrifice fly.

“We don’t give up,” Odor said. “We kept pushing, we kept believing in each other. … We’ve just got to keep playing, keep believing in each other, and that’s it. Everything’s going to be right there.”

Then again, for all the fight the Padres showed, they did themselves no favors on the basepaths. Trailing by five, Fernando Tatis Jr. was picked off first base by Yankees catcher Kyle Higashioka in the sixth. Trent Grisham was caught between second and third on a ground ball, running himself out of scoring position in the seventh.

The loss sends the Padres into that Memorial Day milepost -- an off-day before a three-game series in Miami -- in an untenable position. They’ve vehemently insisted things will change. To this point, they haven’t.

“You’ve got to be hungry,” Darvish said. “I think the guys here are hungry to get better each and every day. As long as you keep doing that, at some point in time, you’re going to see some results.”

Indeed, the Padres still have more than two-thirds of their season on the horizon. They’re expecting Manny Machado back soon. Tatis and Juan Soto are heating up. It’s no longer “early.” But there’s still time to turn things around.

Then again, for an underperforming team, there’s nothing so brutally honest as a hard look at the standings. Monday is Memorial Day. It’s time to do just that. The Padres won’t like what they see.