You can blame bad luck if you want. Or you could point to the Washington Nationals center fielder, Jacob Young, making two miracle catches, and one of those even involved him kicking the ball to himself. But that’s not why the New York Mets are collapsing. They are losing because they are playing unfocused baseball, and after their latest loss, with their season on the line, Francisco Lindor exactly understands that.

The Mets just lost a must-win game 3-2 to the lowly Washington Nationals, and after dropping two of three games, they are now tied with the Cincinnati Reds for the final spot in the Wild Card race. Both teams now have identical 80-76 records, but with 5 consecutive wins, the Reds hold the crucial tiebreaker.

After the game, in a post-game interview, a reporter asked Francisco Lindor if he was happy with the team’s execution.  The star shortstop didn’t hesitate to take personal responsibility for the crushing defeat. “No, not the way I did it,” Lindor began. “I feel like I drove in a run… but I felt like I drove in another one on the defensive side of the game. And if you want to be where we want to be, those things can’t happen. So, for me, I fell a little bit on that. I have to be better.”

Lindor was referring to a critical mistake in the second inning when his costly throwing error directly helped the Nationals score their first run and was a key play in a three-run rally that the Mets would never overcome. Though his bat produced a run with a solo homer later, his glove gave one right back.

The shortstop also dismissed any notion of bad luck. And he pointed directly to the scoreboard as clear evidence of his team’s failures. He said, “You look up in the scoreboard, and I believe they had more hits than us. Think they had 11 and we have nine… You do the math. It’s not, it doesn’t add up for our side… I was giving them opportunities to score. It’s just not, it’s not good.”

Washington’s center fielder, Jacob Young, made two unbelievable center-field grabs. One of them was a circus-like play where he kicked the ball to himself and robbed Brett Baty’s extra-base hit in the fifth that stunned everyone. Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said about that:  “I’ve never seen that before.” And the other robbed a homerun from pinch-hitter Francisco Alvarez’s potential ninth that could’ve tied the game. Lindor, however, refused to use those incredible plays as an excuse and again redirected the focus back to his own shortcomings.

“That’s not why we lost the game, you know? Like I said earlier, my defense wasn’t good and I gave them a run.” In the end, Lindor promised that he would improve, but time is quickly running out. “It comes down to execution, you know, I didn’t execute in big moments or early in the game… and yeah, they and all the teams end up with more runs than us, and we definitely have to do a better job. I have to do a better job.”

Lindor’s willingness to take the blame is what you expect from a team captain, but the truth is, he had plenty of help in the Mets’ latest meltdown, and the loss was a total team effort, a masterclass in how to give a game away.

A Comedy of Errors… How the Mets gave the game away

The Mets’ offense was completely shut down by pitchers they should have dominated. Nationals starter Jake Irvin came into the game with a 9.36 ERA in his last seven starts, but the Mets could not touch him.  Washington’s bullpen had the worst ERA in the entire league, and the Mets could not score against them either.

Juan Soto was easily picked off first base early in the game. Pete Alonso fumbled a routine grounder for an error. Later, Cedric Mullins got confused on a bizarre fly ball, which cost the team a key runner in scoring position. Sean Manaea surrendered a two-run home run to Nasim Nunez on a flat fastball, and when asked why he wasn’t able to elevate his fastball, he said,  “I don’t know.” These are things you can’t expect from a team who have the highest payroll in the league and whose season was literally on the line in this game.

And it’s not just the Nationals game. Since mid-June, the club has been 17 games under .500 and talking about the miscues lately, Mendoza admitted, “We’re not playing well fundamentally right now,” a week ago. Now, though Mendoza has said, “We gotta keep going. We have six more [games], a lot can happen.” The Mets no longer control their own destiny. Even sweeping their final six games might not suffice if the Reds keep the pace with them. Hope is their last strategy.