Save for news that comes in from Mets town, it’s very likely I’ll be packing myself in bubble wrap until Thursday.  I have no use for the All-Star Game this year.  Every Met selected should be carefully wrapped in newsprint and gingerly lowered into a box of Styrofoam peanuts until the Atlanta series.  That’s my belief.

Beltran’s already in that box.  I guess David Wright has an obligation to show himself to be an ironman.  So be it.  As I hear it told, Johan Santana will go but does not expect to pitch.  I’ll bite my tongue about Mets pitchers injuring themselves in non-baseball related activities, such as going out for pizza at 2a in Miami…

I guess that would be more of a concern for Frankie Rodriguez.  Johan Santana doesn’t eat.  He watches Chuck Norris eat and gets his nutrients through the satiation of the universal consciousness.

On the topic of injuries, I’ve been thinking about this lately and wonder if anyone else has: do you think about how bad a player’s hurt when the player indeed is hurt?  I watched Jay Bruce of the Cincinnati Reds try for Wright’s bloop on Saturday night and saw the bad angle his wrist took and how the fall just jammed his arm, there.  Dude fractured his wrist.  If I fractured my wrist, I’d be complaining about it for weeks.  I’d bitch CONSTANTLY.

Think of Carlos Delgado.  Torn labrum?  Bone on bone joint operation?  Spurs?  That’s not minor surgery to have.  How much pain do you think he was in–and forget the “he has to do his job”–and how much do you think he thought about being sixty years old with a plastic hip as opposed to a surgically repaired original?

I absorb the ouchie in the present but afterwards it becomes an abstract issue, this being on the DL.  That stuff’s gotta hurt.  Even with cortisone shots and excellent conditioning and platelet-rich sure sure fine fine… it’s gotta hurt.

Chris Dickerson, replacement for Jay Bruce: back spasms yesterday.  Sheesus.

I could only catch glimpses of the Mets game (against the Reds; W 9-7) yesterday as I made my way to a Bastille Day celebration on Smith Street in Brooklyn.  I should’ve caught the game in whole instead.  With a detention center on Atlantic Avenue just a short few blocks away, revelers contented themselves with skateboarding, sweet Italian sausages and zydeco music.  Nothing French about any of that.  No storming of any jails or hoosegows or clinks or whatever you choose.  Lame.

The Chowdah Watch continues; he went 2 for 5 yesterday.

The Mets are back to three games under .500, still six and a half games behind the Phillies.  This rest will be good.  I’m going to cross my fingers and hope to see a nearly identical line-up three games in a row.

Until then, time to tend to my other starved pursuits, and generally ignore the All-Star circus.  Someone call me if Albert Pujols dons a Superman cape, leaps over Yadier Molina, and dunks a bag of balls into a pitching machine.