The Mets Melt­down begins today. They are 14–2 against the woe­ful Phillies, and just two games over .500 against the rest of the league.

Iron­i­cal­ly, win­ning six of sev­en games against the Phillies over the last ten days exposed New York’s vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. Over those sev­en games, the Phillies aver­aged 5.7 runs per game. That’s near­ly two runs per game above their aver­age out­put for the rest of the sea­son. The Phillies are ranked 26th in run-scor­ing, but man­aged to tee off on Jason DeGrom and the Mets’ sus­pect bullpen, a sign that the vaunt­ed New York pitch­ing staff may be faltering.

Sep­tem­ber may very well ampli­fy this pitch­ing weak­ness. While they have romped over the Phillies, outscor­ing them 103–62 over the sea­son, their mar­gins against the Nats (38–34), Mar­lins (49–44) and Braves (69–52) are much clos­er and have relied more on dom­i­nant pitch­ing than hit­ting. If their pitch­ing stum­bles against the Phillies augur Sep­tem­ber strug­gles, then the Mets’ play­off hopes could vanish.

Their scor­ing binge against the Phillies has engen­dered hope that they can hit their way out of holes dug by bad pitch­ing. Not likely.The Mets are aver­ag­ing a lit­tle more than 4.1 runs per game, around the league mean. But when you back out the 103 runs they’ve scored in 16 games against the Phillies, they’re putting up an ane­mic 3.82 runs per game, which would rank them among the league’s worst.

There is good rea­son why 19 per­cent of the Mets offen­sive out­put has come against Philadel­phia. The Phils have the sec­ond worst pitch­ing in base­ball. Only the Rock­ies are worse and their ERA is mis­lead­ing­ly high since they play half their games in hit­ter-hap­py Coors Field. The Phillies pitch­ers can’t blame their home ball­park for the fact that they have giv­en up an aver­age of 5.07 runs per game. The Nats yield a run per game few­er, while Mia­mi (4.13) and Atlanta (4.71) are both much tougher to score on than the Phillies.

And, oh yeah, the Phillies poor pitch­ing is com­bined with a defense that is by far the worst in the majors. They have coughed up 85 more runs than a team of aver­age defen­sive com­pe­tence, accord­ing to Base­ball Ref­er­ence. Mean­ing that the Mets could pile on runs just by putting the ball in play, as last night’s tragi­com­ic inside-the-park home run by Ruben Teja­da illustrated.

New York’s dom­i­nance of the Phillies masks the fact that the Mets enter the stretch dri­ve as a lousy hit­ting team with weary arms.

The under­achiev­ing Nation­als don’t deserve to win the divi­sion but chances are that, a month from now, they will find them­selves cham­pi­ons of the Nation­al League Least.