“I swear, I’ve seen a lot of stuff in my life, but that… was… awesome.” – Thomas R. Callahan III.

Good thing the Mets have John Maine going Sunday.

As Mets fans, we lose perspective. We get so caught up in thinking about how Jerry Manuel’s job security affects us, we forget to consider how it impacts Nick Evans.

Evans, who was starting important games for Manuel and the Mets in 2008 before struggling in Triple-A then going mysteriously missing in 2009, is now banished to Double-A, buried below Ike Davis on the organizational depth chart.

Much has been made of Davis’ hot start to the season, but Evans — still only 24 — is destroying Double-A pitching. The righty corner bat went 3-for-5 on Friday to raise his average to .395 with a .455 on-base percentage and a .737 slugging.

It’s a tiny sample, of course, and Evans’ weird collapse in Triple-A in 2009 makes him a difficult player to project. But according to MinorLeagueSplits.com, his 2010 Double-A line as of Friday morning (before the three-hit night) equated to an .849 Major League OPS, which would be good for third best on the big-league Mets.

Granted, Nick Evans isn’t likely to keep hitting like the Rogers Hornsby of Double-A, so I’m hardly suggesting the Mets can just call him up to The Show and expect he’ll post an .849 OPS. Plus it’s unclear exactly where Evans could help the 2010 Mets. He’s blocked in left field, right field and at third base by better righty bats, and by Fernando Tatis as the righty bench bat/platoon first baseman.

I’m sure plenty of Mets fans are ready to cut bait on Tatis after his slow start to the year and fluky run of double plays in 2009, but Tatis has earned a longer look with two seasons of solid hitting. Plus the team certainly values his ability to play second and shortstop in a pinch.

So for the foreseeable future, Nick Evans will likely stay right where he is, mashing the crap out of Double-A pitching, cursing his fate, and, presumably, tracking the Mets’ managerial situation from Binghamton.

Thinking out loud: Sherm and I had a quick exchange about linear weights in the comments section here a month ago, and for whatever reason, I thought about it this afternoon.

For years, I’ve argued that a big reason more people haven’t been exposed to more advanced offensive metrics is a simple matter of the language involved: We have easy verbs at our disposal that describe the standard, back of the baseball card stats that so many of us grew up with.

If I say, “David Wright hit .307 last season,” you know that I technically mean, “David Wright got base hits in 30.7 percent of his at-bats last season,” and you take it on faith that the average I’m presenting is correct and don’t bother looking up his at-bats and hits and doing long division.

I can attest that when writing about baseball, it’s sometimes tempting to rely on batting average — even if it’s an imperfect measure of offensive performance — for that reason alone. Saying “he hit .307” is easier and less awkward, in the course of a 500-800 word column, than writing, “he posted a .390 on-base percentage” or “he had an .837 OPS.”

I have to imagine there are baseball writers out there — ones much more widely read than I am — who would be more willing to incorporate advanced stats into their work if only there were more convenient language in place.

For a while, I searched for a verb that could convey on-base percentage. I e-mailed back and forth with John Peterson of Blastings! Thrilledge about this back in the day, but I don’t think we ever came up with a reasonable answer. To say “he based .390” sounds like some sort of drug terminology. “He reached .390” sounds like it was something he was striving for. “He safed .390”? Just weird.

Regardless, perhaps linear weights provide potential for a breakthrough. Though in concept, they are a bit abstract and somewhat difficult to grasp, they attempt to assign specific run values to every possible offensive outcome, relative to zero (making an out).

The stat wOBA — an attempt at a single, context-neutral universal offensive metric — relies on those linear weights. A good primer can be found here.

But instead of making the stat an average of linear runs produced per plate appearance, the stat’s creator, Tom Tango, made it scaled to the league-average on-base percentage to make it easier to digest.

That’s cool, and as someone who has been digesting on-base percentage for a while now, I appreciate it. Still, it adds another layer of complexity to an already esoteric metric, and one I doubt will help it earn any converts among the multitudes who weren’t already using OBP to measure offensive players.

This is almost certainly wishful thinking, and I’m probably missing something here, but I wonder if the stat would be easier to grasp if it were a simple, unscaled average of linear runs per plate appearance.

In my imagination — which is far removed from reality — that could solve the verb problem, since I could write “David Wright produced .320 last year,” or whatever it was, and you could know I meant “David Wright produced offensive outcomes worth .32 runs per plate appearance last year.”

Still too abstract for general consumption? Now that I think about it, yeah. That’s a really broad stretch beyond batting average.

Plus, like I said, I’m sure I’m missing something somewhere. Step up and tell me how I’m wrong, Internet.