Even though it’s overcast and looking like it’s going to rain, I’ll fire up the Webber Grill today (Royal Oak of course no gas grill for me) as it’s the 4^th of July the day we celebrate our independence and at 7 PM tonight I will remove myself from the back yard festivities to watch the most important Mets game of the 2008 season. Time for the Mets to put all the bullshit talk about playing better and turning the corner and battling and yada, yada, yada and step up and show the Phillies that there will be a pennant race in the NL East. The Mets come into the series with a 4-2 advantage in games played so far aganist the Cheese Steakers and our Ace going in Game 1. If Johan Santana wants to get the Mets fan off his back he better channel his inner Tom Seaver (or Jerry Koosman as a lefty) and make a statement in tonight’s game. Time to Ace up Johan.

So José Reyes and Keith Hernandez got in each others face on the plane ride Sunday night due to Mex calling out Reyes for his glove throwing incident. Seems that Reyes family told him that Mex called him out on TV for acting up and Reyes got in Mex’ grill. Good for Jose. Good for Mex. Good to see some guys still have passion and give a shit about whats going on with this team.

Gimp Castillo is on the DL and it seems that J-Man has seen enough of Castillo and I think he’ll fight Omar tooth and nail to keep Gimp on the shelf as long as he can. Warlord Jerry is sick and tired of the aches and pains of Castillo plus is very limited range at second base. It doesn’t hurt either that Damien Easley drives the ball unlike the worm beater Gimp.

Big Pelf has grown up before our eyes. What we are seeing is a guy who has confidence in his fastball and is challenging hitters, daring them to hit his heater. So far Old School is winning over New Age when it comes to the Mets pitching staff.

It looked like D-Wright tweak a muscle in his back last night when he was low bridged while on first base. Later when interviewed Wright gave no information that he hurt anything stating J-Man took him out the game because it was a laugher. More tweaked than Wright’s back or groin was Gary Cohen who called out the Mets (Jay Horowitz) for not getting info to the SNY booth on D-Wright’s status. Gary Cohen is a Man of the Mets People.

Only the Mets can have a player go from looking at season ending surgery to progressing to the point the will be back in the line up soon. That’s the case of Angel Pagan.

While perusing the net today I ran across one of those this date in baseball history post on found this interesting nugget. On July 4^th 1967, the New York Mets beat the San Francisco Giants 8-7 at Shea. The winning pitcher was Jack Fisher and the losing pitcher was the Dominican Dandy, Juan Marichal. What makes this game so special was it was the first time in twenty meetings against Marichal that the Mets beat him Marachal came into the game an astonishing 19-0 against the Mets.