NEW YORK — Dylan Cease has some time before his next start to figure out why his fastball was either going down the middle or sailing well clear of the strike zone.

“I don’t really know if I executed anything very well,” he said. “It was kind of just altogether not good. … It’s one of those I don’t really have an answer for right now. I’ll spend the next couple days working with Ruben (Niebla, the Padres’ pitching coach) to come up with a plan. It was just poor execution in general. So whatever it is, you gotta figure it out and just move on to the next one.”

On Sunday, after he allowed seven runs in 3⅔ innings to get the Padres well on their way to an 11-6 loss to the Mets, Cease was just bummed.

“I didn’t give us a chance to win,” he said. “Ultimately, it wasn’t a good performance.”

Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso launched fastballs over the wall in the Mets’ four-run first inning, during which Cease also walked two batters and allowed two singles. In the fourth inning, a pair of doubles and two wild pitches (one a bounced slider and the other a fastball that jetted about four feet over the head of catcher Luis Campusano) contributed to the Mets scoring three runs.

Cease has had a couple of the Padres’ finest starts this season and a couple rough games, and Sunday he recorded his fewest outs and gave up his most runs in 15 starts with the Padres.

It was his first contribution to an untenable number of games in which Padres starting pitchers have essentially taken their team out of the game early.

Padres starters have a collective 4.10 ERA, which ranks 15th in the major leagues. But that perfectly mediocre ranking hardly speaks to how good and how bad they have been.

Sunday was the 14th game in which the Padres trailed by four or more runs in the fourth inning. They have won three of those games, which has engendered the belief they can do so. A 3-11 record, however, shows the difference between belief and reality.

“It’s not the recipe,” Shildt said. “We’ve done it. Looked like we were going to do it again. Just couldn’t get a shutdown inning a couple times.”

He referred not only to Cease’s two big inning but to the Mets’ four-run eighth inning, achieved off reliever Jeremiah Estrada, after the Padres had gotten within a run in the top of the eighth.

Padres starting pitchers have have turned in 29 quality starts, which ranks 11th in MLB, and gone on spurts  in which they have ranked among the league’s finest groups.

The rotation’s 3.13 ERA over 12 games leading up to Saturday, when Adam Mazur allowed two runs while going just 3⅔ innings, was fourth best in the majors. And that was with Mazur allowing eight runs on June 9.

In six games from May 6 to 12, their 0.78 ERA led the majors. They have had four different streaks of at least three quality starts.

At the start of June, they turned in five consecutive quality starts. But they also scored a total of just 11 runs in those games and lost all five.

Said Shildt after the Padres were swept for a fourth time this season: “We’ve got to start to marrying our hitting and our pitching more consistently to make sure that these ruts don’t happen.”