This morning, I asked Twitter to look up Jason Bay’s stats on Canada Day — which is today, July 1.

This brilliant image is ripped off from our man Patrick Flood at PatrickFloodBlog.com.

Matthew Callan obliged. In 22 at-bats on Canada day, the Vancouver native has only two hits, both of which came for the Pirates in a 2005 tilt in Milwaukee. Bay has walked twice and struck out 12 times on the day celebrating the anniversary of the Constitution Act of 1867.

Disappointed that Bay is, all small sample caveats noted, not the Canadian hero I hoped he’d be, I repeated Callan’s research for another noted slugger from north of our border: SABR hero Matt Stairs.

By my count, in 43 at-bats on July 1, Stairs has 13 hits with six walks, 14 strikeouts, two home runs and a double. That’s an impressive — and very Matt Stairsy — .302/.388/.465 line if you’re playing at home.

I did not repeat the exercise for Canadian-born Larry Walker, Justin Morneau, Corey Koskie, Russell Martin, Joey Votto or anyone else, in part due to time constraints and in part because I want to go on believing that Matt Stairs is the Canadian player that performs best on Canada Day, deserving of all the Molson.

Not sure if this is something anyone else noticed or something that even merits a blog post, but Josh Thole seems to have put his early season struggles behind him. He’s up to a .254/.345/.322 line, so it’s not as if he’s the second coming of Mike Piazza, but he’s now well within the range of respectability for catchers — especially 24-year-old catchers.

His defense hasn’t been stellar behind the plate this year, but Thole now has about a full season’s worth of Major League action on his resume, in which he has posted a solid .273/.352/.352 line.

Plus Thole hits left-handed and hits righties well, making him a valuable part of any catching platoon. Mets catchers — primarily Thole and folk-hero Ronny Paulino — have combined for sixth-best in the NL in OPS in 2011.

On the latest episode of the Mostly Mets podcast — which you should check out, by the way — one of my co-hosts (I forget which) mentioned that “if you squint,” you could see how Jason Bay might be coming out of the awful funk that plagued him for the early part of the season.

And that’s true. You can see that if you squint. Bay has his OPS up over the Ordonez Line to .656, a .241/.326/.330 split. That’s still way below standard for Bay, for players making as much money as Bay and for Major League corner outfielders in general, but hey, baby steps here.

If you want to toy with arbitrary endpoints — and I don’t, but I will because it’s Friday and I’m off to a slow start this morning — Bay is hitting .340 with an .887 OPS over his past 13 games. He even has two homers in that span, which feels like a revelation for him.

The last time we watched a once-strong hitter struggle (nearly) as mightily as Bay did these past couple of months, Carlos Delgado busted out with a two home-run game in Yankee Stadium and then proceeded to carry the Mets into an unlikely and ultimately ill-fated Wild Card chase in 2008. I don’t know why I assumed that if Bay broke out there would be something like that, some tidy moment to identify as the turning point where he returned to hitting like the guy who averaged 30 home runs a year from 2004 to 2009.

Maybe Bay’s return to form will be a bit more polite. Maybe it has already started, and only the squinters have noticed.

Still hard to tell. To these untrained eyes, it appears he’s making contact more frequently but remains vulnerable to breaking pitches on the outside half of the plate. But then I never saw quite enough of Bay in his heyday to know exactly what he looks like when he’s going well. I imagine few Mets fans have. So I think our squinting, in this case, amounts mostly to hoping.

But, you know, baby steps.