There’s little reason to believe in the Mets right now

ATLANTA — There comes a time when you have to stop masking where you are by what you’ve done before, or what others have done before, or how long the season has been. After a while, none of that matters. After a while, only one question counts.

Are you a good baseball team or not?

And right now, it’s impossible to answer that question in the affirmative if you’re a member of the New York Mets. They’re officially no longer a winning team, that’s for sure, after giving up a three-run sixth-inning lead to the Braves on Tuesday night and limping quietly through a 6-4 loss that plunged them back into below 0.500 at 30-31.

Sixty-one games in a season is a fair enough time to get a real read on a team. Yes, there is still a lot of baseball to play. Yes, the mediocrity of the National League and the expansion of the playoffs allow teams to believe it every time a losing streak turns the season sideways. Yes, yes, yes: Other teams over the past few years have looked worse than the Mets right now and ended up sipping champagne.

The comfort of the abstract doesn’t go that far, however.

At some point, that’s replaced by the reality of what you see on the ballpark every day. Tuesday was the quintessential example of a team that just can’t stand on its own right now:

– The Mets started their start well – for five innings. But in the sixth, Carlos Carrasco walked Matt Olson to start, then on consecutive pitches – double from Austin Riley, double from Sean Murphy – a 4-1 Mets lead was 4-3 and Truist Park was committed and electric, and Buck Showalter almost sprinted to the mound to get Carrasco.

–Their biggest guns — Francisco Lindor, Pete Alonso — hit booming two-run homers, but both — and the entire important Mets offense — were limited to one inning, the third. In the other eight, the Mets have never even mounted a serious threat. They amassed all four hits on the night.

– When a relief pitcher really could have provided a huge boost, Drew Smith instead served one of his specialties – a hanging slider – so instead of failing Murphy in second of the sixth inning after getting two outs, Smith gave up the lead on a thundering brace from Marcell Ozuna then on a hard-hit grounder from Orlando Arcia.

–By the time Jeff McNeil doubled a ball into the outfield that helped build Atlanta’s last run, it looked almost exactly as expected. At least the way the Mets did during that four-game losing streak that erased the good-natured aura of that Phillies sweep last week.

“We still have over a hundred games left,” Showalter said later. “I trust these guys will do things their history tells you they will do.”

In theory, of course.

In practice, the Mets are starting to look like an expensive car with a finicky engine. When it purrs, it can be great. But some mornings, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t turn it around. The Mets have been playing average (and worse) baseball for seven weeks now. Joe Torre’s old staircase theory to build a solid season – hit .500; get five more games; getting 10, then 15 and so on – feels well out of their reach now.

And when the opponent is Atlanta — which seems to do well all the things the Mets struggle with — the problem only exacerbates.

“We’re at the part of the year where it looks like we’re getting there,” Lindor said, “but we never really seem to get there.”

Remarkably, on June 7 and 8, in the next two games, the Mets will hand the ball to co-aces Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander – a 38, a 40 – and ask them to hand them a series victory that suddenly seems like a major internal topic of discussion less than two weeks from the first day of summer.

And they will ask them to do this knowing that right now they cannot expect 6-7 support cycles either. It’s a big request.

But right now, so are these:

Are the Mets a good baseball team?

Can they become a good baseball team?

Will they keep spinning their wheels in the mud?

Take comfort in the calendar, again, if it gets you through the night. But at some point, the reality of the moment becomes the reality of a season. Right now, it’s hard to argue that the Mets are any different than what we’re seeing right now.