There is bad baseball, and there is pitiful baseball, and there is painful, embarrassing baseball, and there is the kind of baseball the Mets have played this month, which is none of these things, but is instead just depressing. Watching the Mets these days is like nursing yourself through a hangover, or looking at happy photos of yourself with someone who threw you over for your best friend. Mets fans have been seen lately in their bedrooms, with their shades drawn, listening to the Smiths. Mets players have been seen with paper bags over their heads.

At the beginning of June, the Mets were 34–18, which was the best record in the National League, and enjoyed a 4.5 game lead on the second-place Atlanta Braves. They then lost 10 of their next 12 games, often improbably. They lost four games in a row by three or fewer runs, three of which were closed out by six-fingered closer Antonio Alfonseca of Philadelphia, as menacing a reliever as Lefty Grove, who is dead. Their own closer, Billy Wagner, blew his first save in nearly a year in the last of those games; two days later, normally reliable Tom Glavine coughed up nine runs to the Tigers; two days after that, John Maine gave up three home runs on three pitches against the Dodgers, the last to a pitcher who flipped his bat and preened like he’d just won the World Series. No one even laid him in the dirt after that one.

The pitching has even had the better of it. The lineup is so frail that even wins are embarrassing; in Detroit, Chad Durbin, he of the 5.87 career ERA, needed only 84 pitches to throw eight innings of three run ball at the Mets. In half the team’s games during the recent slide they’ve scored two or fewer runs. Carlos Delgado has a .226 on base average this month; Paul Lo Duca, .261; Carlos Gomez, .281; Carlos Beltran, .175. (It is a bad month for men named Carlos.) Even that doesn’t capture the rancidness of the team’s hitters. Delgado, for instance, has retained the ability to hit 400-foot line drives perfectly squarely; he’s just unable to keep them on the right side of the foul pole. Gomez’s inclination to bunt every other pitch he sees up the first base line, initially charming, has quickly grown irritating. Lo Duca, meanwhile, has yet this month to see a ball six inches off the plate that he doesn’t think he can pull.

Beltran, though, is the problem. Since sitting out the first few games of the month with a nasty injury to his left knee, Beltran has hit a putrid .154 BA/.175 OBA/.231 SLG. This is only part of it. In the field he’s clearly been slowed by the effects of the injury, and with a rotating cast of characters out there and defensive specialist Endy Chavez on the disabled list, the outfield defense, which relies heavily on Beltran, has gone from a strength to a liability. When I think of Beltran in the field, I think of a ball slicing or tailing into one of the gaps, and Beltran elegantly cutting it off from some unexpected angle, snatching it on the run. He hasn’t been doing that much lately.

This shows up in the box scores. In April, the Mets allowed a .266 batting average on balls in play, and in May a .238 average. This was ridiculous and unsustainable, the equivalent of the team hitting .375 or so over the first two months of the season. This month, though, balls in play are going for hits against the Mets at a .317 rate, well below the league average of .296. Of course not all of this is Beltran’s fault, but his hobbled play is probably the biggest single cause. It isn’t just that Beltran is an excellent defensive player when healthy, it’s that he has exceptional lateral range, which allows the players flanking him to shade toward the lines and cut off balls they wouldn’t otherwise reach. Outright bad defenders like Shawn Green and Cliff Floyd have been shockingly adequate, even good, when playing alongside Beltran for this reason. When he’s playing without his normal range, though, balls fall in and the Mets give up crucial runs that they’re not going to make up with their best player looking gimpy at the plate as well as in the field.

The really awful thing about this is that Beltran’s attitude is exemplary. Everyone wants a franchise player to take the field if he’s physically capable, and in his time in New York Beltran has certainly proved that if he’s able to play, he’s going to do so. Still, even as short handed as the Mets are, and given that Beltran insists that he’s fine, it’s hard to see a magnificent player looking like he needs crutches. It’s hurting the team’s play.

Sooner or later, the Mets will be up to their usual tricks. Somewhat lost in all the misery has been David Wright’s monster tear at the plate and improved play in the field; it’s hard to remember why people were genuinely worried about him after his slow start. Jose Reyes hasn’t been hitting for power lately, but he looks to have established a new level of discipline at the plate — batting eyes don’t slump, and he’s been getting on base. The pitching has had its high profile failures, but the team has pitched well enough to win. Delgado, Lo Duca, and Green won’t hit this badly forever, and there’s no reason to think Beltran won’t resume MVP-caliber play once he’s healed up a bit. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong here.

With a high pressure set this weekend against the hottest team in baseball (the Yankees), and then a series with Minnesota, which will include a game against Johan Santana, the Mets are in very real danger of falling into third place within the next few days. The Phillies and Braves are for real. This is still the best team in the National League in my opinion, but their brutal schedule doesn’t let up until next month, and neither of the two teams hunting the Mets are going to call timeout while the Mets heal up and get their heads screwed on. It may be due to nothing more than bad luck and bad timing, but this is a pennant race.

tmarchman@nysun.com