You had your chance, Phillies and Braves

This week began just like any other in June with the Mets losing a series, this time to the Twins. The offense came to life in a game one win, but they were unable to repeat the performance in game two or three. But over the weekend they bounced back at long last, sweeping the A's for their first series win in seven tries.

Tom Glavine, Orlando Hernandez and John Maine each pitched excellently against Oakland and the offense scored at least nine runs twice. No one hitter carried the offense as nine men had at least one multi-hit game with Carlos Beltran doing it twice. Every spot on the diamond had one except for catcher and Ramon Castro did provide a double and score the only run of Saturday's game after Paul Lo Duca got ejected for acting like a jackass. Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran each had five hits on the weekend including a home run by Beltran and two doubles by Reyes.

The rest of the NL East has completely failed to take advantage of the Mets' (41-32) poor June and as a result they were able to stretch their division lead back to three games over the Phillies (39-36) with their modest win streak. The series with Oakland began a stretch in which the Mets will play at least one game on seventeen straight days including a doubleheader this Friday. So they picked a pretty good time to start playing well again.

This difficult stretch of games, which in no way resembles the Bataan Death March, continues with four games against that team that got lucky last October and isn't even ahead of the Cubs in the standings right now, the St. Louis Cardinals (33-39). Jorge Sosa (6-3, 4.05), Oliver Perez (7-6, 3.16), Glavine (6-5, 4.38) and El Duque (3-3, 2.77) will start for the Mets. Mike Maroth (5-2, 5.06) will make his first start for St. Louis since being acquired from the Tigers and will be followed by Todd Wellemeyer (2-1, 6.65), Anthony Reyes (0-9, 6.64) and Adam Wainwright (6-6, 4.58).