By James H. Burns
I can remember the absolute intensity radiating off of Daniel Murphy, or perhaps it was an extraordinary level of nervousness.
Or, likely, a combination of both.
I was standing behind Murphy late in 2008 — his rookie season — when he was playing left field for the Mets.
In Shea Stadium’s last era, management had come up with something clever. Just beneath the bleacher seats in the picnic section — a ticket you could normally only buy if you were part of a group of around at least twenty patrons — it had created a huge screened cutout on the ground level.