Last night’s 4–3 Mets loss to Houston — their twelfth loss in fourteen games and seventh straight at home — saw a Hunter Pence home run in the eighth and a botched Mets bunt attempt in the ninth that turned into a double play. Terry Collins and his team have said in the early going that this team is better than they’ve been playing, and they’re right in the sense that they’re unlikely to win games at just a .278 clip for long. But even R.A. Dickey — last night’s starter, who gave them eight innings of four-run ball — now admits that repeating “We’re better than this” doesn’t mean much if you don’t identify exactly why you’re not playing to potential. Says Dickey, via the Times: “We have to find a way to be honest with ourselves about what kind of team we are. We can’t keep telling ourselves, ‘Oh, we’re a better team than this.’ We may not be.” Keep in mind, it’s only April 21. Though depending on how you look at it, that could probably be either a good thing (in that there’s a lot of baseball left) or a bad thing (in that a key player is already open to the possibility that they’re not better than this).