Mets Get Blown Out 12-5 By Austin Riley, Braves

The Mets dropped the second of three games against the Braves Tuesday night, this time getting blown out 12-5 by the team now just four games behind them in the NL East.

This game was over on Sunday.

It was over as soon as the Mets–and by the Mets, I mean the front office–decided they’d saunter into a five-game series with two “To Be Determined” starting pitcher designations against the team that has won the NL East the last three years and were just a couple of games behind the Mets to start the series.

After choosing a bullpen game for the shortened Game 2 of Monday’s doubleheader, the team decided they’d bring back Jerad Eickhoff, their 12th starting pitching option this season, for a start Tuesday night after designating him for assignment twice within the last 30 days.

Eickhoff promptly gave up 10 earned runs in 3.1 innings, capped off by a grand slam by Austin Riley. (He opened the scoring, too, with a bases-loaded double, and hit another two-run homer later in the game.)

He’s now given up 19 earned runs in five appearances (19.2 innings) this season. Take out his first start–four innings and no runs–Eickhoff allowed 24 total runs and nine home runs in 15.2 innings.

This was a Wilpon-era move, making the predictable decision that’s wrong to just about everyone outside of the team after staring it down the barrel the for a week, then the inevitable happening. (Though, to be fair, this move is happening while up in a division race.)

Yennsy Diaz, Drew Smith and Anthony Banda cleaned up the remainder of the innings. The team probably would’ve been better off asking them for bulk innings to start the game to give them a chance. Diaz was effective until Austin Riley, who plays like Chipper Jones-lite when when he plays the Mets, hit his second homer of the night in the sixth inning.

Smith followed with two shutout innings, continuing his streak as one of the Mets’ most consistent relievers this year. He has a 2.70 ERA through 33 innings this season. Eleven of his 24 appearances have been more than one inning, and he has a 1.80 ERA (four earned run in 20 innings) in those games.

Not to be lost, the offense struggled to do damage early in the game once again against the Braves’ middling pitching staff. They scored five runs Tuesday night–four of them in garbage time. Outside of Jeff McNeil and Pete Alonso, the team has seemed to completely cooled off from their hot 10-game offensive streak starting the second half of the season.

McNeil, who had a two-run dinger Tuesday, and Alonso, whose RBI single got the Mets on the board, have four of six RBI this series and nine of the Mets’ last 13 RBI across six games.

Brandon Drury, who was 3-for-3 after coming in on a double switch, added a two-run home late in the game to close out the Mets’ scoring, and Michael Conforto broke out of a 2-for-22 slump with two hits–a single and a double, both roped.

They’ve scored six runs in 23 innings against Atlanta so far, and they’ve scored 3.64 runs per game across 14 Atlanta bouts. They have two more games’ worth of innings this series against Braves pitching, which they’ve really struggled to tee off on outside of one game in May where the Mets scored 13 runs. (The runs-per-game average drops to 2.92 in the 13 other games outside of the Mets’ one blowout.)

The Mets will try to even the series at two on Wednesday when Tylor Megill takes the mound.

Megill made his first two big-league starts against Atlanta. He combined to allow five runs over 9.1 innings in those starts, but he currently has a 13.2-inning scoreless streak going over starts against Pittsburgh twice and the Blue Jays. He’s lowered his ERA from 4.85 after his second start against the Braves to 2.10 ahead of his third.

Atlanta will throw up Max Fried, who’s generally underperformed this year with a 4.46 ERA. But the Mets have had trouble doing any damage to lefty starters, and Fried is no different, as he’s allowed just three runs in 11 innings against the Mets this season.

The game starts at 7:10 p.m. on PIX 11.