Mets must find way to weather scheduling storm to reach playoffs

ATLANTA — I get it. We can spend the next few days talking about how the Commissioner’s Office should have been more proactive or the Braves less greedy or the Mets willing to play a single make-up game in Atlanta some time during the season to not be in the position of no wiggle room late.

Got it. Please tune to your local talk-screamer to handle all of this. There is no shortage of angles and animus available.

But the Mets should give themselves 24 hours, at most, to ball their fists at the sky and blame anyone from Rob Manfred to Mother Nature to all the people atop the Atlanta Braves masthead.

And then whatever the schedule is — and it might be brutal — the key is to remember how much more awful it is going to be if it does not include playoff games. And the Mets still control whether that happens or not.

There will be plenty of excuses offered to them. They can accept none of them. The baseball calendar is brutal if all goes well. And every team — every player, manager, coach, et al — knows it is not going to go well. With that knowledge of the unforgiving nature of the schedule, all those involved could aspire to control is their destiny when it comes to playing in October.

And with everything that occurred in a couple of disturbing days in Atlanta, the Mets controlled it.

They played a brutal game — perhaps as bad in every phase as they have in weeks — in losing 5-1 on Tuesday night to the Braves in the city that haunts them. They may now have to come back to that city on Monday to play a doubleheader. In between, they have three in Milwaukee. So put returning to Atlanta on the back burner.

The Mets began this season by losing three straight to the Brewers. They could close the standard part of the schedule by winning three straight in Milwaukee. That perhaps will be enough to get them into the playoffs. That might be enough to keep from returning next week to Atlanta.

The Brewers already are NL Central champs and pretty much locked into the NL’s No. 3 seed. They already have signaled they are not going to overextend their starters chasing wins this weekend and since it is possible that the third-seeded Brewers can still play the sixth-seeded Mets, I doubt they are going to show them the full array of what may be coming in a best-of-three next week at American Family Field.

In addition, Francisco Lindor, after missing eight games, was going to be in the lineup if there had been a game in Atlanta on Wednesday night. Without it, he gets two more days of rest for this final stretch.

Meanwhile, the Royals have to win this weekend to get into the playoffs, so the Braves are going to get everything Kansas City can offer at Truist Park. The Braves have not publicly announced their starters to face the Royals, but if they stayed in line it would be Chris Sale, Max Fried and Charlie Morton. That could leave Atlanta with a starting edge if there are games Monday with All-Star Reynaldo Lopez off the IL and Spencer Schwellenbach, who has pitched wonderfully late this season, including holding the Mets to one run in seven innings Tuesday.

Still, even with that victory, the Braves were one game behind the Mets and there was still a way for both to get in if the Diamondbacks continued to falter late.

But if this is about the Mets and Braves, the question should be if not now, when? The only Acuña who will be available for either team the rest of the way is Luisangel for the Mets. Ronald Jr., the reigning NL MVP, last played in late May. Before playing the Mets on Tuesday, Atlanta manager Brian Snitker announced star third baseman Austin Riley, who last played in mid-August, will not be returning. Expected ace Spencer Strider made two starts before being shut down for the year.

The Mets must figure out how to finish with more wins than this damaged version of the Braves. Regardless of how badly the logistics of the series in Atlanta was handled. No matter how arduous the coming schedule might be.

Again, it is all going to be worse if the Mets fly home playoff-less. The schedule is what it is now, which is awful. By the time the Mets land in Milwaukee on Thursday, all of that has to go away. All that should matter is that they have destiny in their own hands in late September to get into October.

Back in March, they would have signed up for that if you told them they had to play a game in a different city every day during the last week of the regular season.

As easy as it might be now to look for the alibi or grab the excuse, that would be for losers. And the Mets still have a chance to leave the regular season as winners.