David Stearns talks causes of Mets' struggles: 'Urgency is not the problem here’

It’s been a tough week for the Mets.

The clubs offense has been stuck in a rut, as they’ve found themselves quickly falling to five games under the .500 mark in the midst of their eight-game losing streak.

New York has been shut out three times, and they’ve scored just 12 runs over that span.

“We haven’t played good baseball for the last week,” David Stearns said Friday in Chicago. “We’ve had a tough time scoring runs -- it’s a combination of we’re not hitting great and we also ran into some good pitching, and we need to play better.”

While the Mets have looked lifeless at times during this tough stretch, Stearns emphasized that urgency is not the problem.

The inability to generate scoring chances has often led to them trying to do too much at the plate, which has led to them sitting amongst the leagues worst in chase rate.

“We’re trying to score runs,” Stearns said. “Sometimes you have to let the pitcher come to you, and that’s really easy for me to say and it’s really easy for me to watch a game and think that -- it’s a heck of a lot tougher when you’re in the box and want to make something happen.

“You guys have asked about urgency -- there’s plenty of urgency, there’s plenty of want -- sometimes that can lead to things like chase rate, unfortunately, but I think that ends with just one bases-clearing double. We’ve all seen that throughout out careers in baseball, and I think once we get that it’ll normalize.”

Even while they wait for that one big knocks, Stearns feels good about the team he assembled.

“We believe in our players,” he said. “Fundamentally, we believe that we have good players who are preparing in the best way possible, who are working hard, and in my experience when you have players who care about the right things -- which our players do -- it leads to good results.

“Certainly over the seven-to-ten days we haven’t seen that, but we still have a long season to go and I’m confident that we will see it.”