" David Wright 's scorching drive in the first inning Friday night struck halfway up that infernal left-field wall at Citi Field for a one-run double instead of a two-run homer, just as Chipper Jones knew it would.

"It's funny to see them hit the ball off the wall and look at me like, 'God-damned, what do I got to do?'" Jones said Friday, before that 16-foot wall and Tim Hudson doomed the Mets to a 4-1 defeat, their fifth in a row.

It's not lost on Jones that the Mets are struggling to contend in the NL East , while his Braves emerged from their franchise slump and will likely make the playoffs for a second straight year. Both Jones and Terry Collins share the opinion that the Mets' lousy home record might be the result of those imposing walls, plus the absence of a jet stream out to right-center, which sometimes carried Jones' balls out of Shea.

Citi Field is both modestly scaled and impossibly dimensioned, an architectural paradox. "I've played here long enough to know that's not a home run," Wright said of his double. There was another blast in the seventh last night by Lucas Duda , a homer elsewhere, which died at the warning track in right.

Will the Mets ever do something about this? Not Jones' problem, really. He dragged his sore quad and surgically repaired knee one more time into Flushing , and the new place was something of an unpleasant reminder about how the romance and aura of the venue had flown."