No miracle yet for Mets as they drop sixth in a row

These last few weeks for Mickey Callaway have served as a pretty good showcase for the various stages of grief. There was denial, of course, and certainly anger. Bargaining factored in heavily, though nothing the Mets tried seemed to work. If there wasn’t depression, there certainly was frustration. And then, on Friday, the last chapter.

Acceptance.

Sort of.

“We’re in a tough spot,” Callaway told Mike Francesa on WFAN a few hours before the Mets fell to the Braves, 6-2, at Citi Field for their sixth loss in a row.

“It’s going to take a miracle.”

After the game, Callaway clarified that it was a “play on words” — an homage to the 1969 team. But it also was sort of true. Or at least it would be.

“It doesn’t have to be a miracle, but we need to get it going,” he said. “We have not put ourselves in a good spot . . . If we don’t change what’s been happening, at some point, if it keeps going this way, heck, it will take a miracle.”

With those words, Callaway said what most people have been thinking this week, thanks to a 3-8 road trip that ended Thursday. Going into Friday, the Mets had a 6.9 percent chance of making the playoffs, according to FanGraphs, and will approach the July 31 trade deadline as potential sellers.

General manager Brodie Van Wagenen was at Citi Field on Friday but declined to answer questions on the state of the team.

This loss was the result of a good but not great performance by Jacob deGrom, another poor inning from Robert Gsellman and a languid offense.

With one out in the second, the Braves’ Austin Riley blasted a fastball down the heart of the plate into the leftfield stands for a two-run homer. The Braves made it 3-0 in the third when Ronald Acuña Jr. led off with a single and scored on Josh Donaldson’s sacrifice fly.

DeGrom (4-7, 3.32 ERA) allowed three runs and six hits in six innings, with two walks and seven strikeouts.

The Braves’ Mike Soroka was perfect through three innings, but in the fourth, Pete Alonso hit his 28th homer, sending a low 81-mph changeup over the leftfield wall to make it 3-1. He tied Mark McGwire’s MLB record for the most by a rookie before July 1.

Tomas Nido’s RBI single in the seventh cut the deficit to 3-2. The Mets loaded the bases with one out, but no small miracle came: Former Met Anthony Swarzak struck out Jeff McNeil and Alonso flied out.

In the eighth, Johan Camargo hit a three-run double off Gsellman, the latest misadventure for the Mets’ bullpen.

“We try our best,” Alonso said. “Our teammates are giving 100 percent effort. People care. We’re still fighting . . . We’re going to try to figure it out.”

And so it seems Callaway’s comments to Francesa were just an acknowledgment of a difficult-to-swallow reality. Still, it wasn’t exactly the reality he wanted to share in his news conference.

In that chat with reporters, which occurred before the Francesa interview, Callaway was nearly dogged in his optimism, with three teams ahead of them in the NL East and eight clubs in front of them in the wild-card race. This weekend is about commemorating the 1969 Miracle Mets, and Callaway looked to them for motivation.

“I’m sure it was some of the same narrative [in 1969] and they overcame it and that’s what we’re going to try to do every single day,” he said, without mention of miracles.

“We can do the same. That’s how I feel about it.”

At 37-46, though, this Mets team is significantly worse than the ’69 team, which was 47-36 after 83 games. Aside from being 12 games behind the NL East-leading Braves, they are five games behind third-place Washington —  and 4 1⁄2 games ahead of the last-place Marlins, three in the loss column.

“You always feel like you’re going to overcome whatever odds there are,” Callaway said before the game. “Last year, the whole time I felt like we were going to overcome it, and I felt that way until the very end and I felt like, hey, if we had 10 more games last year, we would have crept in but we ran out of time.”

The 2018 Mets finished fourth in the NL East, 13 games behind the first-place Braves. They had six teams ahead of them for the second wild card.

“You feel that [you can overcome odds] no matter what’s going on in your life if you’re taking the right approach,” Callaway said. “I never feel like I’m ever going to give up and I always feel like something good is going to happen if we continue to work the right way . . . Now this would be something if we were able to overcome what’s gone on so far this year.”

Something, or — in Callaway’s words — a miracle.

By Laura Albanese

laura.albanese@newsday.com@AlbaneseLaura

Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.