Ken Davidoff

Ken Davidoff

Recent Mets woes make early struggles more painful

You watch a game like this one, 5-1 Nationals over the Mets on Wednesday night at Citi Field, and your mind wanders to how some of manager Terry Collins’ predecessors would’ve described it …

Casey Stengel: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

Bobby Valentine: “Connie Mack wouldn’t win with this team.”

Joe Torre: “Right now, we are not feeling good about ourselves.”

Yogi Berra: “It gets late early out here.”

The Mets are 0-2, the same start as the last season (2005) they ended a multi-year run of losing campaigns. They won their first two games the prior two seasons, only to wind up with consecutive 74-88 records.

Good luck trying to talk rationally this time of year, this year, with these first two showings, however. We need plenty more time to figure out exactly who these Mets are. But the ghosts of old, bad Mets already have entered the building.

“It’s like a bad dream,” said Chris Young, who lasted just a half-inning in his Mets debut, not even making it to the plate, before leaving (and probably heading to the disabled list) with a right quadriceps injury.

It proved a particularly awful night for the Mets’ three expensive newcomers. Bartolo Colon, in his Mets debut, technically pitched well enough to pick up the win, going six innings and allowing three runs, yet his line could have looked much worse had the Nationals not knocked a number of line drives that found Mets gloves.

And Curtis Granderson, who cost the most of all ($60 million over four years), went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts, and is now 0-for-9 with five strikeouts in his first two games. In all, the Mets struck out 13 times against Washington starter Gio Gonzalez and three relievers, and they have 31 whiffs in two games.

The controversial holdovers haven’t helped much, either. The underwhelming first-base trio of Ike Davis, Lucas Duda and Josh Satin is a combined 0-for-8, and though Ruben Tejada has looked better at the plate, he aggravated Collins on Wednesday when — claiming afterward to misunderstand the new rules on home-plate collisions — he got tagged by Nationals catcher Jose Lobaton without even sliding while trying to score on Juan Lagares’ fifth-inning double.

“Today we just flat-out got beat,” David Wright said. “They were a lot better than us in every facet of the game. [Monday] was the one that we needed to win. We let a win slip through our fingers. We got outplayed in every area of the game [Wednesday].”

Really, though, it’s hard to distinguish Game 1 from Game 2 from Tuesday’s off day in between. The Mets have experienced about as brutal a first three days out of the gate as a team can endure.

Monday’s Opening Day didn’t simply punch them in the gut with a bullpen meltdown that produced a 10-inning, 9-7 loss. It also shelved Bobby Parnell with a serious right elbow injury which could sideline him for the rest of the season, news that broke Tuesday. Wednesday brought Young’s injury, and the Mets also played this pair without Daniel Murphy, whom radio folks foolishly decided to rip for rightfully being with his wife during the arrival of their first child. Murphy should be in the lineup Thursday for the series finale.

“Whether we were 0-2, 2-0, 1-1, it doesn’t define where we’re going to be at the end of the season,” the perpetually optimistic Granderson said.

Quite true. Though the Mets’ future is as wide open as the other 29 teams, their past lingers more than most: Their five-year run of consecutive losing records. Their owners’ dramatic drop in payroll, the result of their involvement with Bernie Madoff. The myriad episodes of misfortune and malpractice that shape this franchise, that make the occasional good times even sweeter.

If the Mets ever do figure things out under Sandy Alderson and Collins, their remaining fans will revel in surviving their treacherous path back to redemption. Two games in, though, that treacherous path seems longer than walking Interstate-95 from Maine to Florida.

Collins offered no bon mots afterward to live up to memorable quotes of those who once occupied his job. He has plenty of time to do that, though, if the Mets can’t reverse their terrible first couple of steps.