After a dreadful 2-5 road trip versus the Dodgers and Diamondbacks , and a 9-11 record in their last 20 games, Mickey Callaway is getting tired of making excuses. The Mets suffered their fifth loss of their road trip on Sunday against the Diamondbacks’ Merrill Kelly – a 30-year-old rookie with a 4.41 ERA – and Callaway was livid about the team’s performance.

“We have to do better. I’m kind of getting sick of saying we got to right the ship,” Callaway said. “We have to get it done.”

The Mets’ lineup looked lifeless against Kelly, as the Diamondbacks’ pitcher tossed one of the best games of his career and held New York to only six hits through seven innings of work. Wilson Ramos produced the Mets’ only run with a solo homerun in the second inning, but that was all the offense the Mets could muster during their 7-1 defeat.

“Kelly obviously had a good game,” Callaway said. “But we can’t allow people to have the best start of the year against  us. That’s the bottom line.”

As the fans and media have noticed, the usually positive and chipper Callaway rarely points fingers when it comes to poorly played baseball. But after this road trip, Callaway was visibly frustrated and didn’t have anything uplifting to say.

“Overall game, bad defense, bad pitching, no offense,” Callway said to reporters.

The Mets’ poor defense, which ranks last in the MLB with -49 defensive runs saved, continued to haunt the team throughout the series. While New York made just one error yesterday, there were a several plays from J.D. Davis, Amed Rosario, and Carlos Gomez that should have been made for outs.

Callaway’s comment on “bad pitching” refers to the games that the Mets handed to the opposition on a silver platter by their battered and beleaguered bullpen, which leads the MLB with 13 blown saves.

“We put ourselves in a position to win more games than we did, but we lost them, so it doesn’t matter what position you put yourself in,” Callaway said.

The bullpen’s first meltdown of the road trip came on May 27 against the Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers. New York built a 3-2 lead against the former Cy Young Award winner, but the pen imploded as Tyler Bashlor and Daniel Zamora combined to surrender six runs in the sixth inning during the Mets’ 9-5 loss.

Two days later on May 29, the Mets held an 8-4 lead in the eight inning, and it was the bullpen who struck again. After the Dodgers tacked on one run in the eighth to make it 8-5, All-Star closer, and the Mets’ biggest offseason acquisition, Edwin Diaz, gave up a whopping four runs, setting up a Dodgers walk off win.

And then on June 1 against Arizona, the Mets held another lead – this time it was 5-1 in the eighth – but the bullpen crumbled again and wasted another gem from their ace Jacob deGrom. Jeurys Familia and Robert Gsellman served up four runs to tie the game at five runs apiece, and Tyler Bashlor yielded the winning run in extra innings.

Devastating and demoralizing losses like these continue to pile on for Callaway and the Mets. After an offseason filled with such excitement and promise, time might be running out for Callaway as the Mets limp back home with a 28-31 record and sit five games behind the Phillies in the NL East standings.

“We got to continue to be better, they got to continue to learn and continue to grow and continue to battle and see if we can get where we want to be.”

Any goodwill the Mets built up with their 7-1 homestand against the floundering Nationals and the 22-34 Tigers has vanished.Higher quality teams like the Dodgers and Diamondbacks exposed the Mets’ weaknesses and took full advantage of the team’s struggling bullpen and poor defense.

It is hard to imagine that Callaway can survive many more gut-wrenching losses like these. He is absolutely right that Mets must do better, and they better do it quickly before it gets too late.