London offers disappointing Mets no reprieve from same old story

The conversion rate, when it comes to baseball, is unchanged regardless of which side of the Atlantic you are on. 

The Mets can’t hang with the Phillies in the National League or the International League. The Mets lost three of four last month when the teams played two games at each club’s stadium, which are separated by 116 miles. 

Roughly 3,500 miles away at a facility mixed with fans of both teams — though with considerably more Phillies red on display than Mets orange and blue — nothing much changed. The Phillies were dominant, the Mets disappointing. 

The Phillies were brutish before the British, clubbing three homers. Two came off starter Sean Manaea in a torture-chamber fourth inning in which Bryce Harper merged two sports: think sock-er. Starling Marte showed his poor defense is not limited to North America. And a Mets offense that percolated in the U.S. capital in scoring 23 runs in three games to sweep the Nationals was tamed in the capital of the United Kingdom. 

The NL-best Phillies won, 7-2. The Mets will get one more shot Sunday, this time as the designated visiting team, to try to avoid a two-game sweep at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which houses London Stadium, before returning to Queens. For now, though, the 17 ¹/₂ games that separate the Phillies from the Mets feels further away than home — a symbolic distance between teams that share a time zone and precious little else. 

“The standings are the standings, you can’t deny those,” Carlos Mendoza said. “We have a good team obviously, but they are deep. They are a good team.”