Mets, Braves’ race to regain mojo will decide everything

The mojo was real. It was. If you were inside the ballpark during those halcyon days of June and early July, you know it was. You heard — and saw — Citi Field sound — and look — like it had on precious few days since October of 2015, when it seemed like the whole month was an endless carnival of joy hard by Flushing Bay.

“We want this to last as long as it can possibly last,” Brandon Nimmo said on the giddy evening of July 25 after the Mets had beaten Chris Sale and the Braves 3-2 , a night when the Braves, for a change, had made all the bone-headed plays and the Mets, for a change, had made Atlanta pay for every misstep.

And the next night … well. The next night. Kodai Senga was back, and he was electric, and the Mets threw a 7-spot at Charlie Morton in one inning, and Grimace was dancing and the crowd couldn’t wait to sing “OMG” and there was sheer delirium as the Mets were poised to slip past the Braves into the first wild-card slot. Mojo? This was something beyond mojo …

And then there was a pop-up.

Mets’ Jose Iglesias performs ‘OMG’ live at Rye Playland

And Senga was on the ground .

And look, there’s no need to over-dramatize this: the Mets have won a few games since then. They haven’t exactly fallen off a cliff, even if it felt that way as they scored a solitary run all weekend in Seattle against a Mariners rotation that is quite good, but had yet to be confused in public with Glavine/Maddux/Smoltz. Even after their lost weekend by the Space Needle they’re within a half-game of playoff position.

It just feels … different.

Less joyful, maybe? Less buoyant? These are the dog days, after all. The Mets wouldn’t be the first team to hit the August wall; even as they were winning 31 of 44 from June 3 to July 26 they were still working with a razor-thin margin for error, still tip-toeing through every call to the bullpen, the old words of the great Bob Murphy often coming to mind as it seemed like every night “they won the damned game 9 to 8.”

Mets know they have to ‘maximize’ homestand against bottom-feeders

Of course, joy isn’t in vast supply when you score one run in 27 innings. Glee is fleeting when a couple of the teams you’re battling for playoff position — the Padres and Diamondbacks — win every day.

And confidence becomes muted when it’s clear the team you now have to focus on is the Braves, a team that has had the Mets’ number from April 4, 1993, the day the Braves and Mets officially began to share the NL East.

“We still have a lot of meaningful games ahead of us,” manager Carlos Mendoza said after the Seattle slaughter was completed with a 12-1 loss Sunday night. “We will be ready to go.”

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The Mets have 44 games left, to be precise, and all 44 of them are going to be meaningful, none more so than the nine they have in the next nine days at home with Oakland, Miami and Baltimore. And this isn’t July anymore, where you can say it’s fine to just keep winning series. The Mets have to fatten up against the A’s and the Marlins because their following 10 games — the three at home against the Orioles, then seven in San Diego and Phoenix — will almost surely be the defining 10 games of the season.

And the truth is, they need breathing room now, the kind of breathing room going 5-1 — or 6-0 — against the playing-out-the-string A’s and Marlins would provide. These are the kinds of games the Mets have had difficulty winning during the meaningful portions of recent seasons. And look, maybe what we saw in June and July was more mirage than mojo; that’s certainly in play.

We’ll know soon enough, starting Tuesday. If it seemed silly to see Senga’s injury as an ominous omen … well, baseball breeds such superstitions. Fans of the 1987 Mets will still swear their title defense went south the moment the Mets lost a game in May because a routine fly ball by Atlanta’s Dion James struck a pigeon and scored a key run for the Braves.

Hey, that kind of stuff makes as much sense as the Power of Grimace . Only, back in June, we saw it. It was real. Now they’re scuffling. So are the Braves, who somehow blew a six-run eighth-inning lead to the awful Rockies on Sunday. For now, it’s the Mets and the Braves again, one more time. First to get their mojo back wins.

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