NO WAY, JOSE: Jose Reyes is tagged out — much to his disbelief — by the Phillies’ Jimmy Rollins as he tries to steal second in the first inning last night. (Neil Miller)
Mets Jose Reyes reacts after he is called out stealing second in the first inning. (Paul J. Bereswill for The New Yo)
The manager tries to keep saying the right things, even as he sees so much wrong, so much bad, all around him. There have been nights this year when Jerry Manuel has left the people at Citi Field scratching their heads. More often, he is the one who looks like he’s been gouged on ticket prices and hot dogs and beer.
More often, he has seen a night like this and a weekend like this, a 3-1 loss to the Phillies that climaxed a weekend in which the Mets scored exactly two runs. Before the game, Manuel had expressed one last spasm of hope, talking about winning a series and then getting a bounce into the softest part of the Mets’ schedule.
But there were only two problems with that theory.
One? “The way we’re hitting right now,” Manuel said softly, “we’re just putting ourselves in a trough place every day.”
Two? Manuel wouldn’t say it, couldn’t say it, won’t say it. But the rest of us can: That soft schedule the Mets have been pointing to from the moment they started slipping on banana peels out of the All-Star break? Right now, only Pittsburgh has a worse record since then. And you have to figure the Pirates — and the Astros, too, the first portion of what the Mets hoped would be their Johnny Drama Victory tour — see the Mets as the soft part of their schedule, too.
Yes, it is almost impossible to remember that for 31/2 months, the Mets invited the people who care about them, to care about a pennant race. Yesterday was Aug. 15; exactly one month earlier, on July 15, the Mets started the season’s second half eight games north of .500 and in first place in the wild-card hunt. It only took one skinny month to blow up the previous 31/2 .
If there has ever been a time for the Mets to hope that a month can seem as long or as short as you want it to seem, it is now. Between now and Sept. 15, the Mets will play six games with the Pirates, six games with the Astros, three games with the Cubs, three with the Marlins, three with the Nationals.
Between now and then, the Mets’ opponents have a combined record of 382-437 — and that’s actually skewed, because it includes a series apiece against the Braves and the Phillies, who are a combined 34 games [ital] over [ital] .500.
That soft schedule would look a lot better, of course, if the Mets’ own record were something a little less unsightly than 58-59.
“Now is the time,” Manuel said, using the four-word phrase six different times, a few hours before the Mets’ punchless finale to a one-punch homestand. “Now is the time for us to make that run.”
Manuel has been wishing for that run for weeks now, and instead has seen his team get covered in quicksand right around .500, right at the periphery of the pennant race. There was a time he said he could see a 25-5 run coming. Later he modified it to “30 or 40 games of good baseball,” without offering up a preferred record.
A hard truth this morning is this: When dawn breaks on Sept. 16, after they’ve played the next 29 games, they have to have won at least two-thirds of those games for there to still be anything approaching relevance. And that number probably has to be more like 22-8 or 23-7, given the wealth of bad teams on that stretch.
The harder truth?
It might not matter. The Mets are 10 games behind the Braves, eight behind the Phillies, your new leaders in the wild-card race. The ’51 Giants were 91/2 back on Aug. 16. The ’69 Mets were nine out. But these aren’t the ’51 Giants or the ’69 Mets. These are the 2010 Mets, and they can sometimes make baseball look as difficult as trigonometry.
The manager still believes now is the time, with bad teams aplenty on the schedule. The problem is, those teams are preparing to see a pretty bad team on [ital] their [ital] schedule, too.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com