PHOENIX — The Mets have been so bad lately that a moral victory could have been awarded to them Tuesday.
Sure, they lost their sixth straight, 5-4 to the Diamondbacks at Chase Field, but the bullpen not only wasn’t dreadful, it actually gave the Mets a chance to win. Baby steps perhaps?
Now back to the cold facts. The Mets (16-22) haven’t won on this road trip, and struggling Matt Harvey is scheduled to face Arizona in Wednesday’s series finale. So even if the Mets bullpen stabilized after complete meltdowns Sunday and Monday, there was no cause for manager Terry Collins to turn cartwheels Tuesday.
“The critical part is to get Matt Harvey back out there,” Collins said. “If we come out of [Wednesday’s] game and we’re excited about what we see out of Matt Harvey, we’ll take it.”
The big hit the Mets needed never arrived, negating the work of Paul Sewald, Fernando Salas and Jerry Blevins, who combined for 2 ¹/₃ innings of scoreless relief behind shaky Tommy Milone. That represented progress for a team whose bullpen had surrendered 14 combined runs in the previous two games, both of which were late-inning losses.
The rookie Sewald was particularly effective, retiring all four batters he faced, with three strikeouts. But the Mets couldn’t scratch for the run they needed to tie it.
“[Sewald] throws a lot of strikes, and that’s what I like,” Collins said.
Rene Rivera hit a two-run homer in the seventh against Zack Greinke to resurrect the Mets, moving them within 5-4. The blast extended Rivera’s career-longest hitting streak to 10 games — a stretch in which he is batting .410 — making it easier for the Mets to forget Travis d’Arnaud is on the disabled list with a bruised right wrist.
Yasmany Tomas had homered leading off the sixth to put the Mets in a 5-2 hole. Milone rebounded to record two outs in the inning before Sewald was summoned from the bullpen to finish the inning.
Over 5 ²/₃ innings, the lefty Milone allowed five earned runs on six hits with three walks and four strikeouts. It was a 16th straight game in which a Mets starting pitcher failed to complete seven innings, dating to April 28 in Washington with Jacob deGrom.
Milone received a no-decision in his debut with the Mets last Wednesday, when he allowed two earned runs over five-plus innings against the Giants — a game Jeurys Familia blew with four runs allowed in the ninth, after Wilmer Flores committed an error.
Curtis Granderson, batting eighth for the first time in his Mets tenure, blasted a solo homer in the fifth that sliced the deficit to 4-2. The homer was the third this season for Granderson, who entered batting only .148. But Greinke retired six straight batters following the homer, minimizing his workload in the process.
A botched rundown play by the Mets in the third allowed Paul Goldschmidt steal home, giving the D’backs a 4-1 lead. On the play, Chris Owings broke from first and got into a rundown. Lucas Duda pursued Owings and then bounced a throw to the plate attempting to nail Goldschmidt. Rivera retrieved the ball and threw out Owings attempting to reach third.
“It boils down to I just made a poor throw,” Duda said. “I have got to clean it up. I’ve been bad at baseball for the last week. That’s bad baseball on my part and I’ve got to make that throw.”
Granderson drew a bases-loaded walk in the second inning to give the Mets a 1-0 lead. But Greinke struck out Milone and Michael Conforto in succession to avoid further repercussions from his two straight walks in the inning.
“The bases-loaded situation hurt us probably more than anything,” Collins said. “When you face great pitchers and you’ve got them on the ropes, you had better get them, because if you let them off they end up putting you away and that is kind of what happened.”