What the hell can you say?  It was Jose Fernandez.

That’s my general thought today, after a loss that could have been a win.  We wasted another great start from Matt Harvey?  What the hell can you say?  It was Jose Fernandez.

Our offense seemed to take a complete leave of its hitting sense, swinging at unhittable slider after unhittable slider?  What the hell can you say?  It was Jose Fernandez.

We got only one runner beyond second base, and failed to drive that runner home?  What the hell can you say?  It was Jose Fernandez.

We won the series and got another quality outing from Harvey out of it.  We hit well, in the two games we played that weren’t pitched by the freak with the slider who doesn’t lose at home, and we played three mostly quality games, a few days after we’d been written off as too injury-plagued to compete.

Sure, we should have won today, but you can’t win everyday; you can’t even win every game that you really should.  That’s an elementary lesson of baseball, one that we all learn within days or weeks of picking up the game, and one that is constantly reinforced.

So we lost.  Conforto hit well, Harvey pitched well, everyone fielded well, but we lost.  We did everything we could; it was simply unavoidable.

So we move on — namely, we move on to Pittsburgh, where Neil Walker prepares for his triumphant homecoming even as Jon Niese prepares to nervously face his old team, whose fans can’t possibly remember him all that kindly.  Meanwhile, we’ve got Matz, due for seven good starts after his bad one, ready to claim his eighth win and advance further toward his Rookie of the Year award.

In short, we lost, so we move on.

What the hell else can you say?

I missed most of today’s game on the sidelines of a 10-5 little league loss.  As we left the field, the game called on account of impending darkness, I turned on the radio.

“In this mishegas game…” Howie Rose was saying, as I turned it on.  I knew right there that I’d missed one hell of a contest.

I’d missed Jacob deGrom pinch-hitting, Bartolo Colón singling, and Juan Lagares diving (and, it turned out, injuring).  I’d missed Jim Henderson winning, Hansel Robles failing, and Kevin Plawecki, to quote Walt Clyde Frazier, stumbling and bumbling.

I’d missed Michael Conforto breaking out of his dreadful skid, nominally if not completely impressively.  He singled home a run on a seeing-eye grounder through the shift, and also drove one home on a fly out to medium-deep center.  Is it the .365 that he batted in April?  No, but perhaps one good thing will lead to another, and he’ll get going that way again.

I’d missed Matt Reynolds, inserted as a pinch-hitter for an injured Lagares, singling home the go-ahead run in the eighth, moments after Gary Cohen proclaimed that he was “looking for his signature moment.”  He found it.  An RBI from Reynolds, not meant to play, and two from Conforto, inserted for Cespedes, who was scratched minutes before gametime.  One from Loney, salvaged from the scrap heap to replace Lucas Duda, and two insurance runs from Alejandro De Aza, who you have to think wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity if two of our outfielders hadn’t gone down with injuries.

It was, no doubt about it, our B-squad.  But we made it work.

I’d missed Bartolo Colón going five innings and allowing only one earned run, lowering his E.R.A. to 3.27.  Bartolo didn’t get the win, but he did get a hit, which, to the fans who stood to applaud him, seemed worth just about as much as if he had.

I’d missed shut-down work from Blevins, Henderson, and, of course, Reed.  Reed’s E.R.A. is 1.75.  He has not allowed a run in, well, some inordinate amount of innings.  His fastball, as it blazes to the plate straight and true as a bullet from a gun, can’t help but fill me with confidence.

A setup man?  On top of all these other characters, we’ve got a brilliant setup man?  How did we ever lose?

The one thing I hadn’t missed was the ninth.

We turned it on as we left the field, Howie Rose on the radio, silence filling the car as we listened.  And Familia, as he’s seemed unable to shake doing, gave up a leadoff hit.

We perked up mentally when Loney picked a grounder at first, although we went down somewhat when he couldn’t get the out at second.

When Familia got the second out, we were on the edges of our seats.  And when he ran the count to 2-2 on Christian Yelich, we were ready to celebrate.

And then Yelich singled up the middle.  And immediately, A) De Aza’s 2 RBI double became much more important, and B) our mood soured by a whole lot.

But he’s Jeurys Familia, off as he’s looked this year, and it wasn’t yet time for panic.  Three pitches later, the last of them a nasty slider that you can’t help but wonder why he doesn’t throw more often, Marcell Ozuna was gone, the game was won, and the series was in our pockets.

So far, since the news that we were a flawed team, and that we should expect the Nationals’ lead to grow, we’ve won two games, while they’ve lost that same number.  Tomorrow, we’ve got Matt Harvey, resurgent after seven scoreless innings, looking to continue his newfound mastery of his pitches.

They’ve got Jose Fernandez.  And if a lineup that includes Aaron Laffey and Anthony Recker can take care of Fernandez, this lineup shouldn’t have any trouble at all.

Someone should have told the Mets, entering a Friday night matchup against the surging Marlins, that they were supposed to be a slumping team.  Because from what we saw on the field, it sure didn’t look like it.

Sure, there were a few moments that didn’t go perfectly — Christian Yelich’s two cheap ground ball hits, for example, or the fifth inning as a whole, in which a sawed-off pop up, a grounder, and a fly out led to the then-tying run.

But on the whole, we looked pretty damn good: we held the Marlins to two runs that should have been one, and on the offensive side, we attacked like the pundits always wanted.

Home runs from the seven and eight hitters, two runs each.  Two more RBIs, one from the two hitter, one from the six.  Hell, even a base hit from the pitcher.  There’s nothing like a lineup that’s firing on all cylinders, especially when it’s a lineup that’s wildly exceeding expectations.

With the news that David Wright would hit the disabled list — and that’s a story that I’ll sum up another time — it seems that Wilmer Flores will be our starting third baseman for the foreseeable future.  Wilmer’s been terrible all year; now, in his first game in a starting role, he had two hits, a walk, and an RBI.

We keep saying that we’re due for some luck: this is what it looks like.

Likewise, someone should have told Don Mattingly that inserting a reliever with a 6.50 minor league E.R.A. wasn’t the best idea in the world.  We were a team coming off two lost series, looking for a spark anywhere we could find one — did Mattingly think that we’d led the opportunity to hit off a reliever who can’t even get AAA hitters out go?

Of course not.  And we didn’t.  Rene Rivera — of all people — sent a shot high above the left field wall — “Stanton territory,” said Gary Cohen — and we had the insurance we needed; Familia was out, and Henderson was in.  And three easy outs later, we were winners of game one.

Tied 2-2 in the seventh, things didn’t great, although they didn’t look terrible either.  Then Wilmer walked.  James Loney came to the plate.

In game two of the White Sox series, I began pondering aloud the mystery of James Loney, why a career .285 hitter who hit .280 last year hadn’t gotten a shot in the major leagues.  Later in the game, Loney hit a ball to deep right.  It died at the warning track.

“That’s why,” my friend said.  “He’s got warning track power.”

Well, not anymore.  The career .285 hitter with that little bit of pop showed it off, first pitch against a lefty reliever, and made us forget about Streaky Lucas Duda (sounds kind of like a Donald Trump nickname, I know).

It was his 100th career home run.  And for those of us who got the reference, Gary noted, he ran the bases forwards.

As for Thor, no one seemed to need to tell him anything.  Coming off his strange week of ejections and relief appearances, he came out throwing hard (as if I needed to tell you).

“He wasn’t at his best,” Gary noted, and I’d say that I was scared to see him at his best, except I already have seen him at his best, and it’s everything you expect and more.  Thor struck out nine — the ninth the most important, with the tying runs in scoring position and a 3-2 count to Derek Dietrich — over seven innings, and allowed two runs, that, if we’re honest, should have been one.

And no recap of tonight’s game would be complete without a mention of Addison Reed, who continued to amaze — there’s no other way to say it.  Three strikeouts, all on called third strikes.  two on fastballs, which makes you think that wow, he must really have those hitters fooled.  Not even a trace of solid contact.

And thus, the Mets went into Miami, and fairly easily, took game one of a ten game road trip.  A hardly notable win.  But one that, with its relative simplicity, sent the message that flawed as we may be, we’re still the defending league champions, and we’re still a damn tough opponent.

Today’s game was a festival of awfulness, a brilliant display of lackluster baseball, an exemplary model of sub-par management and play, a veritable gold mine of displays of what not to do.

So I won’t dwell on it.

Instead, I feel the need to address an argument that I’ve seen brewing recently among the Mets online community (I use the term “community” loosely).  The argument, of course, is that we’re scoring too many runs on home runs.

It’s a ridiculous argument, patently illogical and not at all based in fact.  But from the outset, to many, it’s an appealing scapegoat for our problems.

In the form it’s currently being used, the argument goes something like this:

We only score when we hit home runs.  Home runs are too rare to rely on for all your runs.  Therefore, because we only score on those rare occasions when we hit home runs, we’re not scoring enough runs.

Now, it should be noted that this argument is sometimes valid.  Most notably, it’s a completely legitimate complaint if you’ve got a lineup made up of three-true-outcomes hitters, wherein unless you hit a home run, you strike out.  A lineup of nine Dave Kingmans or Adam Dunns would not hit nearly as well as a lineup of nine solid, average hitters.

But even in the case of the hypothetical three-true-outcome lineup, the problem isn’t the home runs: the problem is all the other at-bats.  By definition, hitting a home run is good.  The problem comes in the at-bats when you don’t hit home runs — which, in the three-true-outcome lineup, occurs so often that you can’t muster much offense.

But it’s obvious after a single glance that we DON’T have a lineup full of three-true-outcome hitters.  Just look at one iteration of our current starting lineup:

Now, maybe — maybe — you can call Granderson, so far this year, a three-true-outcomes hitter.  But besides Grandy — again, even he is debatable — there are no Adam Dunns in this lineup.  The two guys who have the majority of our “too many” home runs — Walker and Cespedes — are also batting .275 and .278, and getting on base at respectable clips.

The problem isn’t too many home runs: when you look at our roster, the problem is obvious.  We just don’t have enough good hitters.

With Duda out for weeks, and Wright seemingly close to hitting the DL, it looks, for the foreseeable future, like our starting first and third basemen will be James Loney and Wilmer Flores, not to mention Plawecki’s presumed spot behind the plate, unless he’s replaced by Rivera, who’s not an offensive upgrade.  So far, Flores and Loney haven’t hit, nor did any of the players who previously filled their spots (Ty Kelly, Eric Campbell, Matt Reynolds), nor has Plawecki.

So, look at the lineup.  Two hitters, Flores (or Kelly) and Plawecki (or Rivera) hovering around the Mendoza line.  A third (Campbell playing first, before Loney got here) who can’t hit either.  Granderson, who’s not hitting, although he’s hit well the past few days.  And the pitcher.

Combined, that’s five spots in our lineup filled by players batting in the low .200s, with low on-base percentages to match.  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that that’s no formula for offensive success, “too many” home runs or not.

It’s worth noting that neither Duda nor d’Arnaud was hitting particularly well when they went down.  But Wright was: his OBP was .350, and he’s been filled-in-for by Flores (.231) and Kelly (also .231).  That’s two more guys who just can’t hit.

The problem isn’t that we hit too many home runs, or that we have some systematic problem with hitting with runners in scoring position, or anything like that.

The problem, rather, is that five slots — the majority — of our lineup are just bad, whether there are men in scoring position or not.

Consider it: the corollary complaint to the “too many home runs” theory is that instead, we should score by hitting better with runners in scoring position.  Well, maybe we haven’t been very good with men on base.  But we also haven’t had a very good lineup, period.  When you’ve got five slots in the lineup filled by players batting around .200, the problem isn’t that they’re bad with men in scoring position — it’s that they’re bad, period.

It’s a simple problem, far more simple than home runs somehow being a bad thing.  Our lineup, right now, just isn’t that great.  You don’t need to look beyond that to find a reason we’re not scoring enough.

Now, say we get Wright, Duda, and d’Arnaud back, and each plays up to what they’re projected to d0 — a lofty prediction, but not impossible.  That’s three OBPs of .350 back in the lineup.  That’s an improvement of enormous proportion to our offense.

And even with those three back, we’ll hit lots of home runs, but because the lineup as a whole will be better, we’ll score more.  And maybe we’ll finally realize that home runs aren’t a bad thing.

Things were going so well tonight that for a while, I really expected them to last.

We scored a run in each of the first two innings, both on sac flies.  We haven’t been hitting sac flies recently.  Somehow, I thought the return of sac flies was a good thing.

Walker homered in the third; he’s been doing that a lot lately.  That was a good thing.

After that, there weren’t many.

For five innings, Matz looked like Matz: unsecured upon, not even threatened.  He was hit hard in the fifth, but got around some trouble.  Then the sixth came, and suddenly, like has tended to happen lately, things turned bad.

It started with a single that James Loney, brought in for his defense, failed to field.  Loney, brought in to hit and field better than Eric Campbell, didn’t have a hit, and made one error, and should have been charged with two.  Now that’s what I call the luck of the new Met.

After that, there was so much awfulness I could barely piece things together.  There was a home run allowed, then an RBI single.  There was a pitching change that somehow managed to waste Jim Henderson on retiring one batter — but as I say, Terry Collins, even if he should retire, move to the woods of North Dakota, and never be heard from again, will manage to misuse Jim Henderson.

There was bullpen sequencing that didn’t make sense, a short bench that led to Ty Kelly — he of the .091 batting average — batting (and he actually got a hit!), and offense that failed to muster runs against pitchers who have no business helping their team win games.  There were costly stolen bases that went completely uncontested, useless relievers, and ineffective mound conferences.

It started with Steven Matz, as close to infallible over the past few weeks as we’ve ever seen, losing his stuff.  After five scoreless, he started getting hit hard.  So at only 88 pitches, he left.  For once, I supported Terry’s quick hook: Matz wasn’t fooling anyone.

But did we have to use Henderson, who’s proven he’s good for full innings, for one out?  We couldn’t have wasted the wildly inconsistent Robles on that our, or the unremarkable Logan Verrett?  Henderson could have come in useful later while Robles was busy walking the leadoff hitter, or when Verrett was giving up a single to extend the White Sox’ lead.

Or, we couldn’t have used either Reed or Familia in the eighth, whichever was available?  You’re not going to tell me that both were unavailable: if that’s the case, then it’s a miracle we came as far as we did.  The closer mentality, that the best time to use your best reliever is the end of the game, is an established falsehood: we couldn’t have used our de facto closer in the eighth, and handed Robles in the ninth the bottom of the order, instead of the middle?

Or anything else.  There were a million ways to win this game, and we managed to pull out a loss.

Some losses are fine, completely acceptable, things that happen in the course of a 162 game season.  This one wasn’t one of them.

“You can’t expect to win if your starter doesn’t go six innings,” my friend said on the subway ride home, to which I replied, “you should expect to win if you take a lead into the eighth.”

We can’t give games away, as we did tonight, without using our two best relievers, or without using our best pinch-hitter, or with a four man bench where one of the men is a backup catcher, who Terry Collins has never in his life used voluntarily, another is Ty Kelly, and another is Alejandro de Aza (we got two hits from that bench today, which should tell you how badly the rest of the offense did after the first three innings).

We want to be a first place team, whether or not we’re quite good enough to do so — I’d say we’re more than good enough, but that’s just me — and it’s okay to lose, but not the games we’re supposed to win.  The Nationals beat the Phillies tonight — that’s another game separating us, a game in which we should have kept pace with them.

But beyond that, that’s really all it is: one game, as bad as it turned out.  It’s one we should have taken, but it doesn’t count any more than all of our wins — more than we have losses, and substantially so.

We lost, and we certainly shouldn’t have.  But even so, tomorrow it’s back to normal.