All weekend long it appeared the Mets could not find their stroke against the Dodgers, scoring a mere four runs in three games. All four of those happened on Saturday, three of which scored in just the first inning of that game. If you take away that one inning they scored only one run in 26 innings of play. By the same token, they only registered one hit (Travis d’Arnaud) last night.

Also of note is that all of those runs were via solo homers by Michael Conforto, Wilmer Flores, Curtis Granderson, and Rene Rivera.

On top of it all, and most importantly, they just could not put the ball in play. They struck out a combined total of 37 times throughout the series.

It is not just one or two hitters causing this to happen. This is everyone, even fan-favorite Michael Conforto. You could even say he is at the forefront of the issue with six strikeouts in the series over the course of 12 at-bats. In fairness to him, he is still learning how to handle left-handed pitching and he faced two tough southpaws this weekend in Rich Hill and Hyun-Jin Ryu.

The Mets, however,  are playing in an era that does not care about strikeouts as much as in year’s past. Baseball in general is starting to emphasize the home run ball and ignore the strikeouts. As a result, MLB has seen its strikeout rates among teams rise dramatically over the past couple of years.

While some teams don’t care about it, maybe the Mets really should start to. The fact is they allowed two of the best players at minimizing this go in Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner, who we just watched for three games. Turner, in fact, only struck out one time throughout the series and went 4-for-12 with two home runs. He actually has more walks (43) than strikeouts (36) in his 298 at-bats this season.

This team needs to find other ways to score. It would be ideal if they can get more base runners by putting the ball in play – and moving runners over. This all goes back to the strikeouts. They can’t keep making unproductive outs, that is how you end up scoring four runs in a three game series like they did this past weekend.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are on a completely different level than the Mets right now, but this is an issue that has needed fixing for the past few years and isn’t going to solve itself. Sandy Alderson will be forced to find answers, whether internally or externally this offseason.