PHILADELPHIA — He has never been a darling of Mets fans, not in his first year (when he struggled to acclimate himself to New York) and not in his finest year (which ended, famously, with him staring at an Adam Wainwright curveball) and not at any point in the past year (when a troublesome knee has rendered him all but invisible).
And now, Carlos Beltran has really created a fix for himself.
Because there are a lot of things killing the Mets right now — shoddy defense, shaky bullpen, a growing black hole in the middle of the batting order — but the past few weeks it’s been Beltran who’s been in the middle of so much of the carnage that has taken the Mets from contention to convulsion.
Is that all his fault? Of course not. One man isn’t responsible for the fact the Mets are now 7-16 since the All-Star break, that they’ve tumbled from four out in the East to nine back, that they sit behind five teams in the wild-card chase.
But the fact is, Beltran’s season is contained to those 23 games. And there is a line of demarcation for a lot of people who’ve watched this team: pre-Beltran and post-Beltran. Pre-Beltran the Mets were eight games over .500; post-Beltran they are nine under.
For a player who’s never received much benefit of the doubt in his six years in New York, those numbers suggest he isn’t about to get a hell of a lot starting right now.
“I’m pain-free,” Beltran insisted yesterday. “And you want to say that, yes, it’s coming, that you feel good working and hitting in the cage. But the fact is, you really can’t say that until it happens on the field. And if I’d been playing better on the field, the team would be doing better.”
Yesterday, in so many ways, was Beltran’s season in a microcosm. Not only did he have a brutal day at the plate — 0-for-4, three strikeouts, the last with the tying run on second and one out in the seventh of a 6-5 Phillies victory. But two balls hit by Jayson Werth will undoubtedly — and not unfairly — resume the chorus that wonders if Beltran and his balky knee belong in center now. Or ever again.
The first was a ball that Werth hit about 402 feet, just to the right of the 401 sign in dead center. Beltran went back on the ball, tracked it, backed up some more — then crashed into the wall as if he hadn’t ever seen it before.
The ball tumbled just behind the fence, cutting an early 2-0 Mets lead in half.
“If I don’t get stuck against the wall,” Beltran conceded, “I make that catch.”
The second, an inning later, came after the Phillies had finally reached R.A. Dickey and taken a 5-2 lead, a lazy Werth fly that fell for a pop-fly double when Beltran couldn’t come in in time; two batters later he scored what proved to be the winning run on a single by Brian Schneider.
“Nobody gets that ball,” a gracious Angel Pagan said later. “Not Carlos, not me, not anyone. Sometimes the ball just finds the grass, is all.”
Maybe that’s true, or maybe that’s the opinion of a good teammate who also happens to respect and revere his fellow Puerto Rican. Whatever the case, the Mets remain committed to keeping Beltran in center, a position he has played in his time as well as any outfielder of his generation. But that was with two healthy knees and a full complement of confidence.
“Nothing good is happening for me right now,” Beltran said.
He remains a stand-up guy, an honest evaluator of his own performance, and he gets high marks for that. But right now he also remains a damaged player. The Mets were hoping Beltran’s return could be the surge that propelled them to October.
But that was figuring on the old Carlos Beltran. Not an old Carlos Beltran.