Luke Weaver blows lead as miserable Mets take yet another agonizing loss

The 1962 Mets are in danger of losing their place as a punch line to a less-lovable group of misfits.

Sixty-four years after those Mets made expansion look like a four-letter word, these Mets wasted a quality start from their ace, a 359-foot long ball and the desperate use of a couple of 3-foot sacrifice bunts Thursday by blowing a one-run, eighth-inning lead to lose 5-4 to the Nationals in the rubber game of a series.

The long and short of it is, the Mets (an MLB-worst 10-21) have lost 17 of their past 20 games, are off to their second-worst 31-game start in franchise history and are two games behind the pace set by the original Mets (12-19).

“We have to turn things around,” embattled manager Carlos Mendoza said. “It’s not early anymore.”

With their three top relievers — a low bar to clear — lined up to protect a 4-3 lead, the Mets collapsed when Luke Weaver hung a changeup that CJ Abrams turned around for the go-ahead, two-run home run.

“We sit there and tell you guys, ‘It’ll come, this is the game, this is the law of averages and all these things,’ ” Weaver said. “But those words just don’t hold the same weight when you continue to go day after day.”

The loss wrapped a 3-6 homestand before flying to Anaheim, Calif., where then-Mets manager Willie Randolph was infamously fired after taking a cross-country flight in 2008.

“Not good enough, obviously,” Mendoza said. “Not a secret. That’s not going to do it. We have to start winning series. Period.”

Ronny Mauricio struck out to end the game with the tying run in scoring position after Francisco Alvarez’s pinch-hit, two-out double.

It was the fourth straight inning that the Mets had a runner in scoring position (three times with less than two outs), but they scraped across one total run.

The Nationals led 3-0 until the top of the Mets lineup forged a two-out, third-inning rally.

MJ Melendez followed Bo Bichette’s 10-pitch walk and Juan Soto’s single with a two-strike, line-drive home run that snuck over the right field fence before James Wood could stalk it.

Wood made two other terrific catches, so a hat trick wouldn’t have been a crazy proposition against the run-prevention-focused Mets.

“He had an unbelievable game defensively,” Mendoza said. “There’s a reason why they ended up winning that game. [He’s] one of the reasons.”

Melendez also supplied the lefty-on-lefty bunt that allowed the Mets to take a brief 4-3 lead.

He moved Soto into scoring position for Mark Vientos’ RBI double in the sixth.

Playing with a lineup that had six batters with a sub-.600 OPS at one point during the game, Mendoza tried the sacrifice-bunt strategy again in the seventh to no avail as the Mets wasted Carson Benge’s leadoff single.

But then the Mets abandoned bunting in the eighth after Soto’s leadoff double.

Instead of asking Melendez to lay down another lefty-on-lefty sacrifice, Mendoza sent up pinch hitter Austin Slater, whose groundout to shortstop ended up killing a rally.

“Slater is here to hit lefties,” Mendoza said. “They executed a couple times when we called for the bunt — Vientos came through — but there are also going to be times when we play for the long inning. We had a runner on second base, nobody out, and we took our chances there.”

Melendez didn’t question getting removed despite his big day.

“I have complete confidence in whoever it is that goes up there,” he said.

The first sign that Thursday was going to be like so many other days that the Mets had in April was when Soto’s would-be third home run in as many days was robbed by a glove-over-the-wall catch by the 6-foot-6 Wood in the first inning.

The second was when ace Freddy Peralta turned a double play into a three-base error.

Had he fielded a comebacker cleanly or let it go past the mound, the Mets would have been out of the second inning in a scoreless tie, but instead Nakim Nuñez ran 270 feet as Peralta’s errant throw trickled down the right field line.

Nuñez later crossed the plate with a second run on Jacob Young’s single.

After the Mets tied the score, Peralta retired seven straight hitters and found his way out of a two-on, one-out jam to finish the sixth in a 3-3 deadlock.

“Mistakes happen,” Peralta said. “I know Mauricio was behind me, but the reaction of the play that I had there, it was just trying to catch the ball. I feel stupid because I made the error but we were able to come back.”

Peralta — one earned run on four hits and three walks with six strikeouts mixed in — was in line for the victory after the go-ahead rally, but the Mets don’t win anymore.

“The freedom of which we play day to day,” Weaver said, “is kind of being suffocated a little bit.”