Nationals Continue to Own Mets at Citi Field

Wilmer Flores picks up the ball after booting a potential double-play grounder in the Mets’ 8-2 loss to the Nationals on April 30, 2015. (AP Photo)

For Mets fans who might be looking ahead on the schedule to the very end of the season, we’ve got some bad news: They close at home against the Washington Nationals.

Should the Mets enter that series with their playoff lives hanging in the balance, the prospects won’t look good.

Rarely in sports history has there ever been a case of a team at home being so thoroughly dominated over a significant stretch of games by a visiting opponent to the extent that the Mets have curled up and cowered in a fetal position at the sight of the Washington Nationals in Queens over the last few years.

In the short term, the Mets have lost 15 of their last 16 home games against the consensus best team in the National League East Division (even though the Mets lead said division at the moment), and most of those games have not been close. Thursday night’s loss was not, even though the Mets took an early 2-0 and even though Jacob deGrom pitched three hitless innings to start the game. That game ended in an 8-2 defeat, as Wilmer Flores’ mishandling of a double play ball begat deGrom’s breakdown, which begat a bullpen which put the game completely out of reach and which has had a terrible week, as the absence of Jerry Blevins, Vic Black, Josh Edgin, Bobby Parnell and Jenrry Mejia really began to show.

The Mets began the season 10-0 in home games, and it could not have come to a more appropriate end than this. Since 2011, the Nationals are 31-8 in Citi Field. Some of the folks who’ve done the most damage to the Mets in those games, like Adam LaRoche and Anthony Rendon, weren’t there for the Nats’ first Citi Field destruction of 2015 (LaRoche is on the White Sox and Rendon on the DL), but they still racked up eight runs and made Jacob deGrom look very ordinary.

After the 8-2 loss, the Mets still had a five-game lead on Washington as April ended. But there is no question that unless the Mets turn this long-running trend of home ineptitude around against their primary nemesis in the division, that it will continue to be a problem as much in their heads as it is on the field and in the standings.