Orioles Magic

Shaking things up in this edition of Orioles Magic. The Orioles welcome the New York Mets to the Yard. Rather than have me bring you a preview, I have decided to let guest contributor Matt, a huge Mets fan, do the honors.

Coming off an 19-9 month of May, Mets fans thought that only brighter days were ahead. This winning month, one of the best in franchise history, was highlighted by the beginning of the injury bug (Carlos Delgado, Jose Reyes) but nothing seemed to phase them. All of us knew, that once June hit a lighter schedule was in place in the beginning (Pittsburgh Pirates, Washington Nubionals), followed by tough interleague play. Unfortunately for the Mets (and fortunately for the Orioles), everyone has seemingly started dropping like flies, whether it be John Maine having shoulder discomfort, or even 34-year-old journeyman Ramon Martinez breaking his pinkie.

Things have gone from bad to seemingly worse in our view. First getting swept in Pittsburgh to the lowly Pirates. Then the Phillies came to town, and after holding them off for a 6-5 victory in game 1, the Mets decided to blow 2 games in extra innings, giving us that gut wrenching feeling we are far too used to. This pain went into Friday nights game with Luis Castillo dropping a routine pop up (TWO HANDS!!!) and then our ace Johan Santana getting shelled for 9 runs in 3 innings to our inter-city rival the Yankees.

Needless to say this Orioles/Mets series will be quite interesting. For the Mets, Tuesday they will be throwing out Mike “Big Pelf” Pelfrey (4-2, 4.68) who is coming off a 6 inning performance against the Phillies and has been much improved since the 2^nd half of last year. The middle game will be pitched by Tim Redding (0-2, 6.18) who is also coming off an impressive start against the Phils where he went 7 innings allowing only 3 runs, followed by Livan Hernandez (5-1, 4.33) who is coming off his worst start of the year giving up 6 runs in 5 innings to the Yankees. The keys for the Mets in this series will be whether or not they can put some terrible losses behind them (a dead horse subject), and continue to get quality pitching from Pelfrey and Redding, and attempt to get good hitting out of their backup players. One player that has been on fire, throughout the month of June is third baseman David Wright who is hitting .364 for the season, and .489 for the month.

For the Orioles, they are coming off a series where they welcomed the Atlanta Braves to Baltimore and took 2 out of 3 from the Bravos. For this series Jeremy Guthrie (4-6, 5.52) takes the hill on Tuesday night, Koji Uehara (2-4, 4.37) on Wednesday night, and Jason Berken (1-3, 7.32) in the finale. The keys for the Orioles will be whether their offense can continue to have an explosion like they did against NL East foe Atlanta, or if the offense will revert back to its form for most of the last three weeks. Orioles super prospect Matt Wieters will have to get things going as he is only hitting .233 through 12 major league games.