Today is both our Nation's birthday and All-Star selection day. For analysis on the selection of Chris Young as our representative, go to soco and jdub's combined effort here.

I want to say thank you to all the men and women in the military for protecting our Freedoms. I would like to thank my best friend's BF for serving his country as well, in Iraq.

Today's pitching matchup was Dan Haren against Chad Billingsley. Just for fun, here are Chris Young's stats off Billingsley: (not including today's game) 38 PA, 3 HR, 6 RBI, and a .303 BA with a .368 OBP. I would say that is All-Star numbers.

More about the game itself after the jump.

Nothing really doing through the first few innings. In the 3rd inning, with two runners on and two out, Chris Young  hit a long flyball to deep CF. It looked like a homer off the bat, but Matt Kemp caught it at the wall for the final out.

In the bottom of the 4th, LaRoche hit a double followed by a Mark Reynolds triple barely under the yellow line on the CF wall. This accounted for the games only run for the Diamondbacks. The final batter of the inning, Kelly Johnson looked like he had hit a 2 run HR down the RF foul line, but replays showed it was a foulball. It was not reviewed by the umpires.

In the top of the 6th, Furcal hit a leadoff double. Ethier then hit a single, scoring the run and making an out at second. This would become a topic of conversation for a little while, as LaRoche had cut off Upton's throw. I believe that Furcal would have been safe anyway, as Montero was not setting up very well to receive it.

Haren's day came to an end after 7 innings and 120 pitches. He surrendered 6 hits, 1 run, 2 walks and 4 strikeouts. his counter part, Bilingsly went 6 innings, giving up 1 run on 7 hits, 1 walk and 8 strikeouts.

In the last three innings, the Diamondbacks only managed one base runner off Broxton and Kuo, a Chris Young double.

Heilman relieved Haren in the 8th inning. This was another case of an 8th inning bullpen meltdown as the Dodgers would score 2 runs. Heilman got Carrol to ground out, but walked Furcal. Matt Kemp then hit is 15th home run of the year to make it a 3-1 game. Matt Kemp is now 6-8, with 2 HR and 5 RBI against Aaron Heilman in his career. A couple of batters later Casey Blake grounded to Mark Reynolds for the final out of the inning. That was the defensive highlight of the game, hands down.

Kuo ended up facing 7 Dbacks batters in his 2 innings of work, recording 6 strikeouts. On the day, there were 16 strikeouts by Diamondbacks hitters. Jordon Norberto pitched the 9th, making his first appearance since getting called up this morning

Player of the game: Dan Haren, 31.9%
Honorable mention: Mark Reynolds, 3.7%
Emperor of suck: Aaron Heilman, -31.7%

It took 2:57 to complete and the attendance was at 26,517. At the time of the rollcall, Dbacksskins was ahead by 6 posts over Jdub220, I came in third as I had started writing the recap. All three of us had over 120 posts, accounting for 58% of the total posts. Also present were:  BattleMoses, Jim McLennan, kishi, Clefo, emilylovesthedbacks, Zephon, Bryan J. Boltik, mRcLeAn60, pygalgia, luckycc, hotclaws, NASCARbernet, soco, SeanMillerSavior.

The comment of the thread is this, in response to a hotclaws post:

The rest of us

are celebrating beating you OH SNAP

by DbacksSkins

 (note, only because it is July 4th.)

 We had a fun time in the thread today, I thought. There were a couple of comments that I could have made as comment of the day, including one from Jdub. Next game is tomorrow, against the Cubs. It is a day game.

Have a safe and Happy July 4th everyone.