How David Stearns views this Mets regression and how he plans to deal with it

Just a dozen days before David Stearns addressed the media prior to Tuesday’s game against Atlanta, the Mets had the best record in the sport, were winners of six in a row and held a seemingly comfortable 5 ½-game lead over the Phillies in the NL East.  Join Post Sports+ for exciting subscriber-only features, including real-time texting with Mike Puma about the inside buzz on the Mets.But the Mets president of baseball operations watched his team falter badly — practically out of nowhere — over a nearly two-week span before they faced Atlanta on Tuesday, sitting 1 ½ games behind Philadelphia. Losers of nine of their previous 10, Stearns noted, there’s no one fix that can be applied to get the Mets right again. Instead, Stearns pointed to a regression from their rotation, bullpen and the bottom half of the lineup. “Our job is to get out of this as quickly and as well as we can,’’ Stearns said. He added, “I still think we have a really good team.

I think, certainly, we’re much better than we’ve played the last 10 [or] 12 days.But anytime you go through a stretch [like this], it forces you to evaluate the team.” Because he also said it’s too early to look much at the trade market, the solutions will have to come from within, with the Mets hoping the return of Frankie Montas to the rotation on Tuesday would help, but there are plenty of other issues they still have to tackle — including another setback for Sean Manaea, whose return from an oblique strain has been slowed again by an elbow injury. There’s also the fact that several of their inexperienced position players haven’t contributed consistently, with Francisco Alvarez struggling badly enough that he was sent to Triple-A, as well as Brett Baty and Mark Vientos — neither of whom have met expectations at third base. And younger players such as Ronny Mauricio and Luisangel Acuña also have failed to take the next step in their careers. The Mets continue to hope that Vie...