Raise the white flag.
As if a matchup of two last-place teams on a crummy night in Queens wasn’t enough, the Mets had perhaps their sloppiest, ugliest loss of the season against the miserable Royals, 16-12, in a wild game to open a homestand at Citi Field on Tuesday night.
After opening a five-run lead in the fourth, the Mets gave up a dozen straight runs before getting back on the scoreboard.
It came on a night that saw the Royals hand the Mets a three-run Little League homer, thanks to three errors on one play, in the bottom of the first.
That proved to be just an appetizer for a bizarre night and it still couldn’t propel the Mets to a victory, as their ragtag pitching staff was no match for the Royals, who tagged the Phillies for 15 runs on Monday.
The Mets showed plenty of their flaws Tuesday.
For instance, Kodai Senga proved he can be nearly as ineffective out of the bullpen as he was as a starter.
And even with that, the Mets built a five-run lead in the fourth.
Just as quickly, Austin Warren entered to start the fifth and allowed all six batters he faced to reach base — and five of them to score, as Kansas City improbably tied the game 9-9.
It overshadowed A.J. Ewing reaching base five times at the top of the order and hitting his sixth homer of the season.
Among the many low points, with the game knotted heading into the seventh, Long Island native Matt Seelinger gave up a whopping seven runs in his MLB debut.
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The right-hander immediately ran into trouble, as he walked Lane Thomas on four pitches and then gave up an RBI double to Salvador Perez.
Nick Loftin tagged Seelinger for a two-run shot later in the inning.
He survived and pitched a scoreless eighth, but it didn’t matter.
Coming off back-to-back close wins in Atlanta, the Mets returned to Queens, where they’d lost six of seven in their last homestand.
Looking to win a third straight game for the first time since their four-game winning streak at the end of May, the Mets instead suffered another brutal defeat.
After Cionel Pérez opened with a scoreless first, Senga gave up a two-run shot to Tyler Tolbert in the second.
A pitch away from walking a run in the fourth, Senga instead gave up a rocket double off the wall in left by Thomas to score a pair of runs and make it 5-4.
Salvador Perez followed with a sinking liner to left, which would have driven in two more runs, but Juan Soto’s diving catch ended the inning.
Soto then hit his 20th homer of the season in the bottom of the inning to seemingly give the Mets a comfortable lead.
Not on this night.
“The season presents these challenges,’’ interim manager Andy Green said before the game of the team’s depleted bullpen and pitching mismatches.
He couldn’t have foreseen this one coming, though.
And it doesn’t figure to get much better anytime soon for a Mets team that is already staggering to the All-Star break with seemingly no answers on the horizon.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
