NEW YORK — After a morning of encouraging pregame work from players on the shelf, after the tarp came off the field and the sun broke through the clouds, after a resounding Memorial Day national anthem and accompanying flyover, the New York Mets took the field and thudded their way to a 7-2 loss to the Cincinnati Reds.

The unofficial start to summer feels close to an unofficial end to the baseball season in Queens. The Mets have erased the progress of last week’s 6-1 stretch with a 1-6 run. They haven’t scored even three runs in a game in their last five tries. By the time Monday’s game ended, another Met (Tyrone Taylor) was headed for an MRI and likely the injured list.

“They’re all frustrating. They’re all the same,” manager Carlos Mendoza said of the Mets’ several tough weeks this season. “It sucks.”

This is the part of the season when hope can dissolve into resignation. The boos at Citi Field were quieter Monday — not because the fanbase is any happier, but because it has started to accept the potential reality of an irrelevant summer.

Memorial Day marked the Mets’ 54th game of the season, an even third of the way through. They are on pace for 66 wins and 96 losses.

That 22-32 start through a third of the season is tied for the 10th worst in franchise history. No Mets team has been worse over the first third of the year since 1995. The Mets can attempt to take solace in the fact they had the same record through 54 games in 2024, when they made the NLCS. They need to get Grimace here fast.

The Mets’ primary issue is, of course, an offense that ranks near the bottom of baseball in runs per game, home runs and batting average. It ranks at the bottom in on-base percentage, slugging percentage and, as we hope you can deduce, OPS.

“The biggest thing is our ability to drive the ball out of the ballpark,” Mendoza said. “We got nine hits and two runs. It’s hard to score three or four on just singles. You’ve got to be able to drive the ball, and right now we’re having a hard time doing that.”

Such was the risk of the changes the Mets made to their lineup in the offseason. Pete Alonso has 10 home runs this season for Baltimore. The four additions the Mets made to their lineup have 11 combined.

The positive news before the game — Francisco Lindor started baseball activities, and Francisco Alvarez is on track to beat the eight-week timetable off knee surgery — was mitigated by the on-field performance and the loss of Taylor, who limped off the field with hip pain in the sixth inning.

The hardest part of Monday was watching Nolan McLean get hit hard for the second straight start. After fumbling a 5-0 lead and allowing nine runs (six earned) last week in Washington, McLean yielded seven runs (all earned) in 3 1/3 innings Monday. McLean had allowed 32 runs in his first 17 big-league starts; he’s allowed half that amount in his last two.

“I’m getting behind in counts, not landing my offspeed pitches for strikes, and I’m hitting guys with two strikes,” McLean said. “That’s not a great recipe for success.”

The first problem for McLean is his recent bout with the long ball. He served up two more homers Monday: a solo shot to JJ Bleday in the third and a two-run tater to Tyler Stephenson in the fourth. That’s six homers in the last four starts for the right-hander, who’d given up only six in his first 15 major-league starts.

The second problem has been his season-long struggles with runners on base. With nobody on, McLean has held opposing hitters to a .166 average and .559 OPS. Out of the stretch, opponents are hitting .296 with an .819 OPS. That’s basically the difference between Keith Hernandez’s OPS with the Mets (.816) and Doug Flynn’s (.557).

McLean’s strand rate of 62.1 percent is the third-worst in the majors. Theoretically, that should even out: His strand rate was over 85 percent last season. (For context, Zack Wheeler’s strand rate was around 65 percent through the first half of the 2019 season, just before he broke out. Wheeler had the same sharp distinction between performance out of the windup and out of the stretch.)

“We’ve got to dive deep here because something’s off, for sure,” Mendoza said.

“I think it’s just bad pitching,” McLean said. “I haven’t been pitching my best, and I’ve got to pitch better.”

That’s the basics of it, across the board.

“We’re not putting ourselves in a good position, obviously. Whatever I say here,” Mendoza said at the postgame podium, “doesn’t matter. We’ve got to go do it.”