Mets have had reality check against Giants and Dodgers

At the start of this brutal stretch of schedule, 13 consecutive games against the Giants and Dodgers, when the Mets had just recently fallen from first place and borderline awkward optimism was the company line, they knew it would be a tough.

But they didn’t expect this mess.

Heading into the finale against San Francisco on Thursday, the Mets were 2-10 against the NL West powers. Both victories came on the West Coast, when the club was desperate to avoid getting swept; one required extra innings.

Altogether, these two weeks have exposed the Mets as a team with major flaws —with increasingly longshot odds of making the playoffs.

"We were aware they were talented and playing really good baseball, watching highlights and studying them and how both teams operate," manager Luis Rojas said Thursday afternoon. "I didn’t think that, at this point with one more game with the Giants, we were only going to win two games. I thought we would win more games than this."

When the Mets greeted the Dodgers to Queens two weeks ago, they were fresh off a sweep of the Nationals, just a half-game back of first place in the NL East. At the start of play Thursday, that division deficit had ballooned to seven games, with the Mets’ cold streak coinciding with Atlanta’s hot streak.

Rojas finds comfort in knowing how closely the Mets have played the Dodgers and Giants. Of the 10 losses, seven were by just one or two runs.

"It’s been a tough stretch because of results, but we’ve battled against these two teams," he said. "Proud that the guys are pushing and have been resilient in all the games. I think we can take a lot out of it, knowing we’re in this. We’re fighting against two of the best teams and we weren’t necessarily out of every game."

Naturally, then, a theme of the teamwide slump is the same as a theme of their season: The hitters have not been hitting.

That has been particularly evident against the Dodgers (5.17 runs scored per game on the season) and Giants (4.87). The Mets have toiled at 3.74.

Further, the Giants lead the majors with 192 home runs. The Dodgers are tied for fifth with 177. The Mets, expected to slug their way to more than a few wins this year, are way down at 26th with 130.

Watching the Mets’ opponents recently has shown Rojas why that is: They swing confidently.

"These guys hit the ball hard consistently. They take hacks. Even the foul balls, swings and misses, they're all in," Rojas said. "They get fooled, but it's a swing. And it feels really dangerous when they take swings. So we've seen that. That's something that I think we've been lacking.

"We just gotta have a little bit more conviction out there when we're swinging for a pitch, looking for a pitch and finding that pitch and taking those hacks as well. We are going to get fooled sometimes, but just stay committed to it. Our guys have progressed into that already. I've seen better swings, like I did [Wednesday], we just gotta keep going and make it consistent."

Silver linings and lessons learned aren’t nearly as important as wins and losses, though.

"After two weeks, it is disappointing we haven’t gotten the results. We haven’t won as many games as we should," Rojas said. "I explained some of the things that we've seen that these two teams are doing that we didn’t do against them. We're working off of that just moving forward. That’s all we can take out of the series against these two teams."