I used to listen to Mets games on the radio far more than I do now, owing to the fact that, before the days of SNY, Mets telecasts were helmed by a rotating collection of nauseatingly abject broadcasters. I couldn't bear listening to Fran Healy, Ted Robinson, Matt Loughlin, and so forth, so I would watch the games on Fox Sports New York and flip the radio to WFAN so I could hear Gary Cohen and Howie Rose call the action. It was glorious save for one tiny synchronistic imperfection: the radio broadcast was thirty-odd seconds ahead of the television broadcast, so Gary and Howie would describe a play and a few long moments later I'd see what had happened. I got accustomed to it rather quickly, but Kim had very little patience for it. What we saw on TV was rather like an instant replay of the radio call. It was as close to perfection as I could get at the time, though, and it sure beat the alternative — Fran Healy calling every pop-up a "can of corn."

In 2006, SNY began broadcasting Mets games, and they transposed Gary Cohen from the radio booth to TV land, and in so doing they essentially put an end to my radio involvement with the Mets. Now that Cohen was calling television broadcasts, and he was flanked by Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling to boot, I no longer had to jump through the audio-visual hoops to hear the baseball commentary I wanted paired with the moving pictures I so adored. Now, apart from the occasional car ride which happens to coincide with a Mets game, I scarcely hear the sweet, dulcet tones of Howie Rose anymore.

All of this is a roundabout way of introducing Josh Lewin (@joshlewinstuff) as the Mets' newest radio broadcast partner to Rose. Lewin replaces the nearly universally reviled Wayne Hagin, who himself superseded the unspectacular but decently cromulent Tom McCarthy. Regarding the new WFAN hire, Shannon Shark at Mets Police (@MetsPolice) has what I would consider a near perfect list of suggestions for Lewin. I'll adumbrate them for you here, but please check out the original post for further descriptions of each.

1. Describe the plays.
2. You are allowed one catch phrase.
3. No "we."
4. Don't fake it about Mets history, just lean on Howie.
5. If the Mets suck be honest.

This is about as comprehensively succinct as you can make it, and it's all you can really ask for in a broadcaster. For those of you who do listen to Mets radio broadcasts with some regularity, what are you looking for from Josh Lewin? Any sagely advice?

You'll have to forgive me if I hold my breath regarding Daniel Murphy and second base.

As I read how Tim Teufel recently started working Murphy into the best shape of his life at Port St. Lucie this week, my relief at hearing about honest-to-goodness baseball activity barely negates my belief that the Mets should cover their projected second baseman with bubble wrap until Opening Day. Admittedly, he's probably turning two against baserunners in the Jay Horowitz mold rather than the bush leaguers looking to make a name for themselves. It was also his own footwork that brought his 2011 experiment at second base to a close with a little help from Jose Constanza of the Atlanta Braves.

It's not even the fragility that frightens me most about Murphy up the middle. It's that thinking of him trying to reinvent himself in Flushing reminds me of the Mets moving Mike Piazza or Todd Hundley out of their comfort zones to try and extract a litle more offensive value from their aging sluggers. Or Jose Reyes adjusting to the other side of the diamond while Kazuo Matsui shoddily sticks at shortstop. Or Howard Johnson looking lost in center field after making a career for himself at the hot corner.

But Teufel, who himself wasn't exactly a defensive dynamo at second base, can get Murphy on track. Right?

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We're down to the last few days before pitchers and catchers officially report to St. Lucie so naturally it's time for the Mets to start trending on Twitter. Daily. Seriously.

David Wright was talking to the media yesterday, and the topic of his contract came up. Much like the speculation surrounding Jose Reyes last season I'm sure this won't be ending until the July 31st trade deadline passes (and maybe not even then).

Mike Baxter may not be on the 40 man roster anymore, but he's still excited to be a Met. While it may have quite a bit to do with growing up locally, I'd imagine the less than imposing Jason Bay being penciled in as a regular starter with an impending vest of doom probably doesn't hurt his belief that he could contribute here. Hopefully he does.

Dillon Gee is just so ordinary, or at least he was. Now he's got some interesting facial hair to at least distinguish himself from the rest of the back of the rotation fodder.

The New Yorker has a little piece up about the Mets. If nothing else, it does a nice job of recapping some of the funnier Mets one liners of the offseason.

Toby Hyde continued his top prospects list with #15 Aderlin Rodriguez. Hopefully we see a little more contact from Rodriguez this season, if we do he could skyrocket up the prospect rankings.

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With 42% of the vote Reese Havens is elected the #6 community prospect.

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My big brother was a mathematician, and a terrific sports fan. He died of cancer as young man, but had long seemed wise and mellow and kind. The two of us had similar hearts but different heads. I strained to inch through math problems he conquered instinctively. He contentedly enjoyed literature I made a cult of and championed. He was an easy going guy, whose eyes could bug out if he judged he'd communicate some of the elegance and complexity of the physical world. I keep the notes from his doctoral dissertation -- a stream of chicken-scratched formulas, hundreds of pages of literal Greek.

Tom died just as I was coming into my own as a serious baseball fan, and my sabermetric turn accompanied several changes following his death. I quit my job, which was a decent job but asked me to bullshit and wheedle. I took up work that featured thinking-time and no lies. Occupational ambition seemed to me stupid, as it seems to me now. I have around me the same family, books, city, friends, and -- yes -- sports, that set my desperately sick brother to hailing his good luck.

I never knew Tom to take up with advanced sports statistics, but it seemed like something he might have done were his little brother to become a partner. So I came here and met you all, and fell in with the first honest and constructive debates I had ever really encountered -- about anything. I was a literature major in college, and remain fascinated with shifting criteria and hopelessly mixed together values. A couple of lines of Blake could crack my skull open, but I had little experience with theories that build through slow, scrupulous, inspected-and-corrected processes. I don't think I oversell it to say that baseball was my first practical introduction to science. I fell in love with the question, "But is that true?" -- and saw how empiricism could cut a light beam through the shadows of surmise.

My brother was not a "pure" mathematician. He worked to model a certain intracellular function, to do with microscopic pumps and the movement of fluids. I remember his shift toward biology (from physics) and the total amazement he expressed almost daily, catching sight of some new vista. Bug-eyed, he told me that the evolution of all creatures from a single cell -- as impressive as that is -- in no wise competes with the complexity and wonder of that one single living cell.

In 2009, a year after his death at age 26, Tom's department held a conference in honor of his work. Talk after talk showcased upbeat scientists propounding on their inadequacy in the face of a human cell. One speaker put it this way: If machines work best through rational efficiency, cells function with the most fantastic redundancies, varieties, entanglements, and elaborations; more than you could fit into a billion dreams. All a mathematician can do is fashion his "models," essentially stick-figure sketches of the masterpiece. These are never right, of course -- but there's hope, at least, they'll prove useful.

These, then, are the two faces of science. There is the Tom who might remind you matter-of-factly that the Big Bang Theory is not in dispute -- sure, unwooly Tom. Tom who knew math was not fooling.

Beside this Tom, there was Tom in his large, full life -- Tom amid the fantastic redundancies, varieties, entanglements, and elaborations of a world that won't fit into a billion billion dreams. My twice-brilliant brother was as slow-to-judgment and accepting as any ignorant flat-head you'd ever meet. This humility -- as I see it -- is also the scientific view. Sure, he had an outlook and worldview he strove to improve. But they couldn't be right -- they could only be useful to himself and others.

As it turned out, they proved beautifully so.

When it comes to baseball, the crowd at large underrates the math. All we do is underrate baseball. I have no truck with big-bang deniers who would build a roster and run a baseball team through ignorance. In some realms math doesn't fool, and every GM's gotta know that.

But baseball is mostly some other thing. Baseball is mostly what Tom and I grew up adoring with our old man, who conjured the beer-call he'd made in the old days slinging suds at Comiskey Park. Baseball has to do, somehow, with wood bats, uniforms, characters, summer, New York, newspapers, history, my dad, Tom, and you all.

At work I share a locker room with all sorts of sport fans. There are a good many West Indians who come to the game through cricket and still talk of a bum pitch as a "bad ball." I'm friends with an Albanian who taught himself to speak Italian listening to transnational soccer broadcasts growing up; in this country he can barely watch soccer, he says, and he idolizes Ike Davis. Next door to my house, cigar-chompers meet on a Brooklyn stoop and page through a shared copy of the Daily News. "What do you think of this Murphy kid?" they growl over the fence. Baseball to them is neighborhood chatter. And to my wife's mother, it's THE YANKEES.

New York is the greatest baseball town in America for being so thick with narratives and fans. If there was but one type of brain tuned to the game -- our kind, or any other -- the sport wouldn't have the mojo to sustain three newsletters.

So this is a plea for tolerance and good cheer in the face of what might seem idiotic - for slow-judgment and humility in the face of varieties of baseball experience that aren't our own. The game is simple. The Game is vast and shoreless, and we'll never ever find a right way to enjoy it. Of the dozens of baseball fans I personally know to be fine men and women, about two-and-a-half take interest, as I do, in parsing the game with nifty tools.

They aren't right; they aren't wrong. This much I learned from my big brother's math.

Hat tip to Five-Tool Tool for inspiring a part of these ruminations.