Hamels rocked during soggy home debut

• Cole Hamels is 0-2 this season

PHILADELPHIA – Rain soaked Citizens Bank Park on Tuesday night.

Sheets of it fell sideways across a largely empty stadium, as a midweek game in brutal weather conditions — along with a playoff hockey game across the street — drove many to skip out on the Phillies' opening contest of a seven-game homestand.

The downpour also soaked the left hand of Cole Hamels, who was making his 2014 home debut. Hamels struggled with grips for most of his 4 ⅔ innings. Control escaped him en route to a 6-1 Mets win.

"The elements definitely got the best of me today," Hamels said.

Hamels walked five batters, the most he's walked in outings of less than five innings in his career. He's also had never walked four batters in an inning, something he did in the fourth frame of the loss.

"From my standpoint, I'm truly embarrassed just for the fact that I didn't really give anybody a chance" Hamels said. "It's an embarrassment because I'm not allowing my teammates to get into the game. When you're walking that many guys ... you don't give your team a chance to win in that case."

The cold rain didn't bother Jon Niese much. Niese allowed just one run — a solo homer from former Met Marlon Byrd in the fourth — over seven innings. In the last two seasons, Niese has made seven starts against the Phillies and has a 2.14 ERA in those outings.

"Niese has been effective against us, this club, for a couple years now," Sandberg said. "We did hit some balls hard right out of the gate for two or three innings, but didn't have any base runners on that. He seemed to take that and run with it and really settled in."

With the poor showing, the Phillies (13-13) fell back to .500. Had they won, they would've reached two games over .500 for the first time since Oct. 1, 2012, a span of 189 games.

"We just weren't able to get anything going offensively," Sandberg said.

Some questioned whether the game should've even been played. The Mets are only in town for two games in this series, and they travel to Denver on Thursday for a series with the Rockies. A rainout Tuesday — coupled with a likely rainout Wednesday, judging by early forecasts — would've meant two games to make up between the teams, and four days for the Phillies without playing a game.

Getting Tuesday's game in, then, was paramount. The teams waited out a one-hour, 28-minute rain delay before starting the game at 8:33 p.m.

Should Wednesday's game be postponed, the teams would likely play a doubleheader in one of the two remaining series between these teams at Citizens Bank Park, either May 29-June 1 or Aug. 8-11.

"It's baseball. You have to get your games in," Hamels said. "I mean there's going to be games that are wet, and cold and 110-degree temperatures. You just have to be able to play and master what you have out there and try to execute it and I wasn't able to do so."

Sandberg did not regret playing the game.

"It was what we expected," he said. "It was the same for both sides. It was what we expected to play in."

Contact Chris Branch at cbranch@delawareonline.com