Mets must find a way to survive the storm of scheduling to reach the 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 how the Braves should have been less greedy, or how the Mets should have been willing to play a single make-up game in Atlanta at some point during the season to avoid ending up in a situation where they run out of cap space.

Got it. Please tune in to your local talk screamer to hear all about it. There are plenty of angles and hostilities.

But the Mets should give themselves 24 hours at most to raise their fists and blame everyone from Rob Manfred to Mother Nature to everyone on the Atlanta Braves masthead.

And no matter what the schedule looks like — and it could be brutal — the key is to remember how much worse it will be if there are no playoff games. And the Mets still have control over whether or not that happens.

They're offered a lot of excuses. They can't accept any of them. The baseball schedule is brutal when things are going well. And every team – every player, manager, coach, etc. – knows it's not going to go well. With that knowledge of the relentless nature of the schedule, all involved can only strive to control their destiny when it comes to playing in October.

And despite everything that happened during those few exciting days in Atlanta, the Mets had everything under control.

They played a brutal game – perhaps worse in every phase than they have in weeks – and lost 5-1 to the Braves on Tuesday night in the city that follows them. They may have to return to that city on Monday to play a doubleheader. They have three in Milwaukee in between, so the return to Atlanta is postponed.

The Mets began the season with three straight losses to the Brewers. They could close the regular season with three straight wins in Milwaukee. That might be enough to get them into the playoffs. And maybe enough to avoid having to return to Atlanta next week.

Already NL Central champions and all but locked in 3rd place in the NL, the Brewers have already signaled that they won't overwork their core players in the hunt for wins this weekend, and given that it's possible the 3rd-place Brewers can still play the 6th-place Mets, I doubt they'll show them the full range of what could be in store next week in a best-of-three game at American Family Field.

In addition, Francisco Lindor, who has missed eight games, would have been back in action if a game had been played in Atlanta on Wednesday night. Without that, he would have two more days of rest for this final stretch.

Meanwhile, the Royals need to win this weekend to make the playoffs, so the Braves will get everything Kansas City has to offer at Truist Park. The Braves have not publicly announced their starters for the game against the Royals, but if they stick with it, it would be Chris Sale, Max Fried and Charlie Morton. That could give Atlanta an advantage when it has games on Monday with All-Star Reynaldo Lopez from the IL and Spencer Schwellenbach, who has pitched beautifully this season and held the Mets to one run in seven innings on Tuesday.

Despite this victory, however, the Braves were one game behind the Mets and both still had a chance to make the quarterfinals if the Diamondbacks continued to stumble.

But when it comes to the Mets and Braves, the question should be: If not now, when? The only Acuña who will be available for either team for the rest of the game is Luisangel for the Mets. Ronald Jr., the reigning NL MVP, last played in late May. Before Tuesday's game against the Mets, Atlanta manager Brian Snitker announced that star third baseman Austin Riley, who last played in mid-August, will not return. Expected top hitter Spencer Strider played twice in the starting lineup before being out for the year.

The Mets need to find a way to win more games than this struggling version of the Braves, no matter how poorly the logistics of the series were handled in Atlanta. No matter how grueling the upcoming schedule might be.

And again, it will be even worse if the Mets go home without a playoff spot. The schedule is what it is now, and that is terrible. By the time the Mets land in Milwaukee on Thursday, this will all have to be over. All that matters is that they have their own destiny in hand at the end of September to get into October.

They would have signed up for it in March if they had been told they would have to play a game in a different city every day during the last week of the regular season.

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