Paywall (subscribe!) but the intro is enough to address the contrast between Phillies, Mets and Dodgers. For now.
The Mets are in a chumpy way at the moment. They have scored 10 runs in their last six games and have just one home run over that stretch. If you look at this from the perspective of wanting the Mets to score runs, that is annoying, but it is also probably not very important. Even very good teams will phase in and out of chump mode over the course of a long season, because that is the nature of the baseball season and also the nature of baseball. This doesn't make it less irritating when it happens to a team you care about, and sometimes teams that are expected to be good really do turn out not to be. But because this sort of thing is so inextricably a part of baseball, there's nothing to do but figure out how to discern what's noise and what isn't, and then get to work ignoring everything that deserves to be ignored.
For instance: The Los Angeles Dodgers have allowed 32 runs in their last 36 innings, which covers a four-game losing streak during which they were swept in a three-game series at Dodger Stadium, by the Angels; in a loss on Monday night, they swung at 42 of Diamondbacks starter Brandon Pfaadt's 93 pitches, didn't miss any of them, and had a .000 batting average on balls in play. They have 29 wins, a .604 winning percentage, and are in first place in the National League West. They have real problems—a number of starting pitchers with a number of variously severe or worryingly vague injuries, most notably—but they are not bad. It would be reasonable for a fan to get mad, watching this highly credentialed team blast one Brandon Pfaadt pitch after another directly at a waiting Diamondback fielder. Anything more than that would be ... well, no one gets into being a fan of a baseball team to be reasonable. But it would be excessive.
