Original Mets radio broadcaster, worked with the team through last season. Lung disease, just short of his 80th birthday. I never took the retirement 100% seriously because he was still around and there was always a chance he'd drop in for a couple of innings sometime.

Murph was the voice of our hopes and frustrations: never entirely in the homer category, but showing just enough that we knew he was feeling it with us. Murph was the cool dark of one in the morning, straining to stay awake for those last few innings from the West Coast trip. Murph was a little Midwestern, a lot honest, knew when to speak, when to be silent, and how to let the scene speak for itself.

But mostly, Murph was spring.

That's how you knew winter was ending. You turned on the radio and suddenly, there was a spring training game, and Murph was rattling off the three dozen prospects who were rotating through the field, and the score would stop mattering somewhere around the third inning, and it was just you and the radio and a little piece of the world that felt warmer by ten degrees.

Bob Murphy is dead. And spring will come -- but only in the normal way.

I miss him.