"No," he said as if it were a four-letter word. He tried to put his anger and frustration back inside where it wouldn't fit. Twenty feet away, Doug Mientkiewicz beat himself up and offered mea culpas to everyone from Casey Stengel to the fetus his wife is carrying to 20 guys sitting in the upper deck at Shea 15 years ago to Jerry Seinfeld. "Every Mets fan everywhere," he said. And across the clubhouse, Mike Cameron snarled.

The Mets were an open sore Monday night. They snarled, they fumed, they ached -- because they lost. They had been wounded again. They hated what they just had experienced. "We got a chance to be good," Cameron said. "We've got to take advantage of it, and it's making us pretty upset that we haven't."

They hadn't Monday night, when they lost to the Braves, 8-6; they hadn't Sunday, when they should have beaten the Yankees, either. And Friday night's loss to the Yanks, the first fallen domino, still irked them. Make no mistakes, these Mets care. "You're [darn] right," Cameron said.

Their passion for winning and their frustration were there to be seen in the eighth inning when they were certain they had tied the score and confident they would do more damage. And then again a moment later, when an umpire's call denied them two runs.

Wright thought his slide at second base had forced a wide throw to first, denied the Braves an inning-ending, 3-6-1 double play and left the Mets in position to win. But second base umpire Jeff Nelson ruled Wright had "intentionally interfered with the [shortstop, Rafael Furcal] in the act of turning a double play" and awarded the Braves two outs.

The call irked the Met as much as the loss would. Wright erupted as he disputed it with Nelson, prompting his first ejection since he was in Class A. And the other Mets acted stunned as the Braves returned to their dugout. "I've seen a lot of worse slides," manager Willie Randolph would say later. "You see that call usually when the shortstop gets flipped. But David never touched him. He put pressure on him, but he just threw it away.

"We're not playing footsie ball. We teach hard, aggressive baseball. I thought it was an unnecesary call."

The play happened after Wright walked with the bases loaded to force in the Mets' fifth run. Mientkiewicz pulled a ground ball that first baseman Julio Franco handled cleanly. Franco's throw forced Wright at second. The return throw by Furcal to pitcher Chris Reitsma, covering first, rolled away. A replay showed Wright had slid at Furcal, not at the base.

"He showed no attempt to reach the bag safely and stay on it," Nelson said. "It was an intentional act on [Wright's] part, and it's automatic that the batter/runner is called out on the back end of that play since it's intentional."

"I've always heard that if [the runner] can reach the base with his hand or whatever, then there's no call," Randolph said. By the time he left the clubhouse, Wright had acknowledged that "if I couldn't have reached the base, I was still close." And he demonstrated how.

"I wasn't trying to hurt him. I didn't even get close to him. It was a good, clean slide. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they don't make that call. But it was made, and we've got to respect it."

As damaging as the call was, it hardly was the lone reason for the 13th loss in 20 road games. More to the point was the shaky pitching of starter Kaz Ishii, who allowed seven runs in four innings and, in the process, woke up two struggling Braves hitters in Furcal and Marcus Giles.

Yet to win in five starts in his first season with the Mets, Ishii put his team in a 4-1 hole in the second when he surrendered a bases-loaded triple to Furcal, who just had completed a 6-for-50 road trip. The Mets pulled within a run in the fourth when Cameron hit his fifth home run and Wright doubled and scored.

But Ishii (0-3) allowed a three-run home run to Giles, who began the night with one home run and seven RBIs.

"Every time we come here, it seems like it's Giles who kills us," Cameron said.

The Braves, who had lost five of their previous six games, played without Chipper Jones, a Mets nemesis, and catcher Johnny Estrada, who needed a rest after playing most of the last seven games. But they had enough to deny the Mets, who played without injured Carlos Beltran and limited resting Mike Piazza to a pinch-hit at-bat.

And another infield error -- the Mets made two more Monday -- led to the run the Braves scored in the eighth, the run that loomed large when Chris Woodward led off the ninth with a home run against the Braves' deposed closer Danny Kolb. When Kolb struck out Cameron for the third out -- after he had trotted to first base in a previous pitch, thinking he had walked -- the Mets had two runners on and a chance.

"You can see how much we want it," Wright said. "We're so emotional. It's great we have passion for winning. You have to give credit to Willie -- how we play. But when you come up short, that passion doesn't just go away. There's still passion in here, and the game's been over for an hour."

Wright had had a productive night. He hit his eighth home run, over the center-field wall, against winning pitcher Horacio Ramirez (3-3), to lead off the second. He doubled, stole third and scored in Mientkiewicz's ground ball in fourth, singled to drive in Miguel Cairo in the sixth, and he walked with the bases loaded in the seventh against Adam Bernero.

But he left the clubhouse empty-handed, wishing he could have done more.