ATLANTA — What do you do when the cornerstone of your baseball team becomes a millstone around its neck?
What do you do when the face of your franchise, the face around which you’ve built your future, looks like it’s just taken a pounding from the young Mike Tyson?
“This can be a humbling game sometimes,” David Wright said quietly last night. “It can bring you to your knees.”
WILD TOSS SEALS METS’ FATE IN NINTH
That is where Wright is spending too much of his workdays lately, on his knees, upside down, inside out, in the kind of nightmarish baseball place he never could have envisioned for himself even two years ago. Suddenly, he’s not half the man he used to be.
Suddenly, it isn’t just the fact that he officially is striking out at a record-breaking pace (55 of them now, on pace for 222 over the full season); or that he again came up woefully short in the clutch last night, unable to catch up with Billy Wagner’s 96-mph gas in the ninth with Luis Castillo standing on third base and one out.
Wright is finding other ways to kill the Mets, too. His wild throw past Ike Davis in the bottom of the ninth allowed Brent Clevlen to jog home with the winning run in a 3-2 Braves victory. Two days earlier, he dropped a force play at third base that opened the gates for a six-run Marlins outburst in another Mets loss.
Wright has endured slumps in the past, on both ends of the ball, but he’s never been this much of a two-sided menace. You can tell it’s killing him. You can tell it’s eating him up inside. You can tell that as mind-numbing as it is for everyone else to ponder precisely what’s become of his game, it’s a thousand times worse for him.
He’s living it.
And dying a little bit more game after game, failure after failure.
“Guys are going out there and they’re giving their best effort every night,” Wright said, “and it’s just tough when I’m playing as poorly as I am right now.”
The Mets are killing themselves finding new ways to light themselves on fire late in games. Of their 21 losses, seven have come in the opponents’ final at-bat, five in their past 15 games alone. They have so little margin for error that any little mistake is almost certain to cost them. That blinding light has been finding Wright like a magnet lately.
“I think he needs a day off,” Jerry Manuel said, hinting he would sit Wright tonight in Washington, but it seems he’ll have an argument on his hands if he tries.
“That would be the worst thing that could happen,” Wright said. “I want to get this taste out of my mouth.”
In truth, keeping Wright on the bench isn’t as vital as finding a way to restore him to what he used to be on the field. This is no 37-year-old man finally feeling the wrath of the years. Wright is just 27, right at the start of what is supposed to be his prime. If he’s on pace for those 222 K’s, he’s also on pace for 105 RBIs.
He still has his old gifts locked inside him. They just need to be summoned, and fast.
“I’m frustrated for him,” Manuel said, shaking his head.
He isn’t alone. Wright was no one-year wonder when the Mets made him their clubhouse centerpiece. His first four full years, 2005-08, were the best of any homegrown position player in team history, by far. He hit for power, hit for average. Hell, when he actually puts the ball in play he’s hitting .430 this year.
Nobody wants to cop to this — not Wright, not Manuel, not anyone — but he does flinch at inside pitches, especially breaking stuff from righties, and it’s impossible not to believe the beaning he absorbed from Matt Cain last year isn’t at least partially to blame. The book on Wright now is to bust him inside early, then put him away on the outside half.
Or, as Wagner did, just throw it hard. Because right now Wright can’t get out of his own way. The cornerstone has become a millstone. If it stays that way, what chance do the Mets possibly have?
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com