updated 11:46 p.m. ET Sept. 19, 2007

WASHINGTON - The New York Mets bunted over runners. They took the extra base. Their bullpen protected a lead. And, for the first time in a week, they won a ballgame.

David Wright’s three RBIs, Moises Alou’s three hits and Mike Pelfrey’s good-enough start helped the Mets beat the Washington Nationals 8-4 Wednesday night, ending a five-game losing streak that cut their lead in the NL East to 1½ games.

And there was more good news for the Mets about an hour after the game: The second-place Philadelphia Phillies lost to the St. Louis Cardinals 2-1 in 10 innings, pushing New York’s lead back up to 2½ games.

Pelfrey (3-7) allowed three runs in five-plus innings to win his third consecutive decision. After he left, Jorge Sosa and Aaron Heilman combined for three shutout innings, a stretch that began with Sosa getting a strikeout and a double play to escape a first-and-third, no-outs jam in the sixth. Billy Wagner gave an unearned run in the ninth.

There were plenty of Mets fans in the announced crowd of 20,558, and they greeted Wright’s plate appearances with “M-V-P!” chants. He drove in runs with a single in the third that gave him 100 RBIs for the season, a sacrifice fly in the fifth and a double in the seventh. That last hit, on a liner to right, might have been a single, but Wright stretched it into a double, sliding around the tag at second.

Not all was perfect about this performance, though, with Wright making one of New York’s three errors — giving the team 13 in its past four games.

But other positive contributions did include all of those hits from Alou, who left Tuesday’s game with a left quadriceps injury and was a game-time decision Wednesday. He wound up legging out a double plus two singles, scoring twice and driving in a run before leaving for a pinch-runner in the seventh. His 23-game hitting streak is the NL’s longest this season.

Paul Lo Duca also departed early, although not before delivering two runs with sacrifice flies. Lo Duca was called out on strikes in the eighth but argued he had been hit on the arm by the final pitch of the at-bat and threw his helmet into the dugout when he left the field. He came out for the bottom of the inning, but left before a pitch was thrown, replaced by Mike DiFelice.

It was Lo Duca who, before the game, sat at his locker and spoke about wanting to “see what we’re made of.”

On Tuesday, the Mets held a players-only meeting, then went out and lost a second straight game to the fourth-place Nationals.

“You can talk all you want. And you can say all you want. You can have every cliche in the book or whatever, but it just matters that you’ve got to get 27 outs, and you’ve got to win the ballgame,” Lo Duca said. “I don’t care how you do it. We can get outhit 20-1, and if we win the ballgame, I’m fine with it.”

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As it turned out, the National finished with a 12-11 edge in hits, but the Mets produced far more runs. Those sac flies helped, as did two sacrifice bunts that moved up runners who eventually scored.

The game was tied 2-2 heading to the fifth, when Jose Reyes singled with one out, Luis Castillo tripled him home and Wright added an RBI single to make it 4-2. The Mets wouldn’t trail again, knocking out Matt Chico (5-9) after scoring five runs in 5 1-3 innings.

Chico hasn’t won a game since July, a drought that covers seven starts.

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New York added three runs, one earned, in the seventh off Chris Schroder. Shawn Green led off with a single, was sacrificed over by Reyes, and scored on first baseman Robert Fick’s throwing error on Castillo’s grounder. Wright’s double followed, and Alou’s RBI single finished the scoring.

Notes: Pelfrey went from July 19, 2006, to Aug. 31 this year without a single major league victory — starting this season 0-7 — and now he has three in September. ... After striking out three times in previous eight games, Nationals CF Nook Logan matched that total in his first three at-bats Wednesday.

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