Tim Byrdak also drove up to the Space Coast to witness Discovery’s launch. Either because he planned in advance or because Major Leaguers just have way more access to cool stuff than most of us do, he got to watch it from about 3.5 miles away, about as close as you can be if you’re not yourself lifting off. Plus he got to ride on a bus with astronauts and talk about robots and stuff.

Byrdak confirmed that the space shuttle launch was awesome. Apparently from that close, you can feel the rumbling of ignition and everything. Josh Stinson overheard us and said he caught a launch last year from a golf course here in Port St. Lucie. He said he went out to a Par-5 and laid down on the fairway. Not a bad plan.

The Mets have posted their lineup for the Grapefruit League* matchup with the Braves today, and Daniel Murphy is starting at third base. Obviously it’s way too early in the spring to read anything into the lineups themselves, but I’d guess the Mets are probably trying to get him as many reps in the infield as possible.

Murphy hasn’t played third base in a Major or Minor League game since 2008. He has a handful of Minor League and winter-ball appearances at second. This is probably something fans should keep in mind if Murphy looks a bit awkward out there today and, hell, for the length of Spring Training.

I didn’t see yesterday’s game, but I asked Murphy how he felt at second and he said, essentially, that he’s coming along. I asked him if camp was different as a (primarily) middle infielder, and he said, “It’s still catching and throwing, taking ground balls.”

With practice, people can improve at just about everything. Murphy, from what I’ve seen and heard, practices as hard as anyone. It stands to reason that he’ll get better as he does. It seems like a lot of fans have determined already that there’s no chance he’ll ever be able to handle second — especially since, as Mike Salfino has pointed out, very few players have successfully moved from first base to second.

But these games don’t count, and Murph is going to be out there so he can have every opportunity to become a passable Major League infielder in time for the ones that do.

“I want to be out there every day, if they’ll let me,” Murphy said.

And remember that the eyes can deceive; just because a guy looks uncomfortable or unwieldy bending over for a grounder or turning a double play doesn’t necessarily mean he’s fielding his position less effectively than a guy who looks slick. In a not-large-enough sample, the stats loved Murphy at first. He said he wasn’t too familiar with the defensive stats, but when I suggested that there’s some disconnect between the way his defense is perceived and the way it was measured in 2009, he said:

“Well, I’m not very aesthetically pleasing out there. I’ll be the first to admit: I’m not graceful to the eye.”

That’s probably not changing anytime soon. But again: Teams win games by outscoring their opponents, and there are a lot of ways to do that. The Mets don’t exactly have Cirque du Soleil acrobats in camp to save 20 runs from second base, so we might witness some awkwardness and growing pains for a while.

*- Is this a good time to buy grapefruit in Florida? Grapefruit is delicious, though it doesn’t taste anything like grape. Also: We need more grapefruit-flavored stuff. I <3 Fresca.

I heard a strange sound coming from the Mets’ batting cages yesterday so I walked by to check it out. Jason Bay was in the box with a coach feeding tennis balls through a pitching machine. Bay wasn’t swinging much. The odd noise was the hollow tennis balls popping through the machine at high speeds.

I asked Bay about it during batting practice this morning. Turns out what he was using was the “ocular enhancer” machine the team agreed to lease as part of Carlos Beltran’s contract. The machine fires tennis balls with red or black numbers on them at speeds up to 150 mph. Players stand in the box and try to read the color and number on the balls.

“The eyes can be trained, like any muscle,” Bay said. “You can take a few cuts, but it’s mostly for tracking.”

Bay added that after watching pitches at 120 and 130 mph, a 90 mph fastball looks like it’s floating toward the plate.

I spoke to Beltran about the machine a few minutes later. He said it’s something he has been using since he was introduced to it in Kansas City, and that he uses it all season long.

Beltran said he can’t read the numbers when they’re coming it at 130, but when they slow down to 85 or 90 he can.

“It’s fun,” he said. “If you believe it can help you, it will help you.”

I had a chance to talk to Josh Thole and Mike Nickeas in the locker room this morning. I’ve noticed that none of the Mets’ catchers in camp use the new goalie-style catcher’s masks, which I’ve found way more comfortable than the traditional helmet-and-facemask combo in my limited experience.

Thole said he found the new mask a bit too heavy, and that he tried it out for a while after he had a concussion but didn’t think it made much of a difference. He said that getting hit in the face with a fastball is going to hurt no matter what mask you’re wearing.

Nickeas said he thought the goalie-style masks offered slightly better vision, but that — and this was something I hadn’t considered — their contours make a ball off the face ricochet back toward the backstop, whereas the traditional version is flatter and so tends to knock the ball forward.

So if you’ve ever wondered about that, there’s that.

If you watch the video I post here a bit later today, you will hear me note several times that I’m not a scout, that my eyes are not professionally trained, and that I have no idea what I’m looking for. Sometimes I think I do and even convince myself of it, then I speak to someone who knows more than I do and I’m shown all the countless things I am missing.

I watched the Mets take infield today. I watched the Mets do a lot of things today, but it was the infield session that most impressed me. What could only be described as the Mets’ first group was on the field. Ike Davis at first; Luis Castillo, Daniel Murphy and Brad Emaus at second; Jose Reyes and Chin-Lung Hu at short; David Wright at third.

It’s the same thing every Little League team in the country does at every practice: Coaches hit grounders, players scoop ’em up and throw them to bases. Only the Mets are, you know, better than Little Leaguers. Much, much better.

This is breaking news: Major League Baseball players are awesome at baseball. Just watching Reyes throw is worth the airfare to Florida. Next to him Wright charges short grounders, with the tongue out and the underhanded zip to first, the whole thing. It’s not full-on real-life now-it-counts baseball action, but it’s more concentrated than anything you get in games. During the season you might have to watch the Mets for a week to see Reyes make ten throws from the hole. Here it happens in 10 minutes.

A couple people I spoke to pointed out how Murphy looked awkward at second. And compared to the other second basemen, perhaps he did. But he still cleanly fielded almost all the balls hit his way, caught all the relay throws from Wright and Reyes and fired a string of bullets to Davis. There was no way, from the drill, to measure his range against Emaus’, or those of every other second baseman in the Majors.

The one clear distinction among the three men vying for the Mets’ second-base job taking grounders on Field 7 on Thursday is that many of the particulars of the position appear to come easier to Castillo than they do his teammates. When turning double plays, Murphy and Emaus catch, then throw. For Castillo it’s one fluid motion, like some sort of martial art. The ball enters his glove then comes out his hand, redirected in flight.

Yes, that Luis Castillo: The limping guy with diminished range and no power and the dropped pop-up and everything else. He’s probably not going to make the team and he seems to have little to offer any big-league club at this point, but either his innate ability or the countless repetitions over his 15-year career (or some combination thereof) has provided him an apparent comfort at the position that neither Emaus, with 266 Minor League games at second or Murphy, with 19, can boast.

The good news is it’s not entirely clear that it matters, beyond the aesthetics. Terry Collins has made it clear he believes second base is an offensive position, and since Castillo is hardly covering a ton of ground at this point, the few runs the Mets might save from a handful of extra double plays Castillo would turn that his competitors could not probably do not make up the difference between their bats.

Collins said Justin Turner is still in the second-base mix. And he praised Ruben Tejada’s hitting in the batting cage and said it was “very possible” that the 20-year-old could play his way into a starting job with the Mets, even if he’s ticketed to play shortstop everyday in Buffalo.

Still, Emaus must gain some advantage by being a Rule 5 pick, and Murphy some by being the hard-working home-grown business-meaning fan favorite with 707 not-terrible plate appearances on the back of his baseball card, all of which came before he was the age either Emaus or Turner is now. Collins keeps saying he’ll settle the roster battles in Grapefruit League games.

If I had to bet right now, I’d put money on some combination of Emaus and Murphy — no surprise, I suppose — opening the season at second base for the Mets. It might not make for the most graceful platoon, but the object is only to score more runs than you allow, however you get there.