Mandatory Credit: Andy Marlin-USA TODAY Sports

The New York Mets are in the midst of their toughest stretch of games this season, with 13 straight contests against the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. Needless to say, the squad hasn’t put together a ton of awe-inspiring performances thus far.

After sweeping the Washington Nationals last week and seemingly gaining a bit of momentum, they got swept by Los Angeles (including an embarrassing showing on Sunday Night Baseball) and needed extra innings to avoid getting swept by the Giants. While there are a number of things that need to change for New York if they want to play in October for the first time since 2016, the elephant in the room is the offense.

Or, more like the lack of offense, as team owner Steve Cohen pointed out on Twitter Wednesday morning. Something that’s been consistently frustrating throughout these past six games is that the Mets’ offense — which has been a shell of the unit we were expecting to watch this year — has been nearly non-existent in the early innings.

Over these past six games, the Mets have been the first team to score just once and have scored a grand total of six runs during the first six innings of these contests. It almost feels like it’s a nightly occurrence now that these dudes don’t wake up and try to fight on offense until the opposing team pushes across a run or two (or, you know, six). Drawing conclusions from the last six games isn’t necessarily a fair thing to do, but when we take a peek at the rest of the year, this same pattern holds up.

The Mets’ offense consistently doesn’t seem to come alive until at least the middle of the game, and that’s not a recipe for success by any means. Wednesday’s series finale in San Francisco isn’t accounted for in the following statistics, but after getting shutout through the first eight innings on just four hits, it won’t make what we’re about to talk about any better.

Entering Wednesday, the Mets were averaging 2.42 runs per game through the first six innings each night. That mark was second-worst in baseball and only better than the Pittsburgh Pirates, according to Team Rankings. It improves when we look at New York’s offensive performance between the seventh and ninth inning, but not by much. They’ve been averaging 1.20 runs per game prior to Wednesday, which ranked 20th in baseball. The teams immediately surrounding them doesn’t make you feel all that good, either. It includes the Miami Marlins, Colorado Rockies, Chicago Cubs, and Baltimore Orioles.

The Mets’ pitching staff has done as much as possible to keep this team afloat while the offense continues to sputter, but they can only do so much. Through the first six innings of games, New York’s hurlers were surrendering an average of 2.81 runs. That’s actually among the top-10 in the league, but it’s not helpful when the offense can’t score runs themselves. The club’s 1.13 runs allowed through the final three innings is also among the best in baseball, but it’s not much better than what the offense can accomplish during that same period, so again, it’s not exactly helpful.

Some other important team offensive statistics back this up, too. The following numbers don’t include Wednesday’s game, but again, it’s not like including those numbers would help the Mets’ case here. Check out how they’ve performed at the plate between the first and third inning, between the fourth and sixth inning, and between the seventh and ninth inning:

(sOPS+ isn’t park-adjusted, but it’s similar to other advanced metrics because 100 is average.)

So, yea, every team has its own identity and gets going in its own way, but having to constantly play catch-up in the middle innings isn’t a sustainable winning strategy. It’s happened a few times over these past six games already, too. Not getting on the board until the middle or later innings has led to it either not being enough at the end of the day or putting more pressure on a bullpen that’s been overworked.

An image I haven’t been able to get out of my head since it happened Monday was this sequence of fastballs in the middle of the strike zone from Giants starter Kevin Gausman in the first inning. And, of course, how Pete Alonso, Dominic Smith, and Michael Conforto failed to barrel even one of them up.

Obviously, they had just flown across the country and landed in San Francisco around 3 am EST. The majority of these are also not fastball counts, so there are other things at play here. But still, in the midst of a tailspin like the Mets are, there has to be someone stepping up to get this group going if they want a chance to reclaim first place in the National League East.

The futility of this offense has been mind-blowing to watch (in a bad way), and the fact that they typically aren’t showing up until the middle innings has been extremely problematic. Let’s hope the 12th-inning home run from Kevin Pillar sparks them as they head to Los Angeles for a four-game series with the Dodgers. We’ve said that before, though, so now we’ll just have to see what really happens.