<img alt="MLB: SEP 30 Mets at Braves - Game 2" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZZqytqL56AVUwdcPihqQqxM6SLg=/0x0:3600x2400/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73788207/2175288648.0.jpg">
Photo by David J. Griffin/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Atlanta’s star catcher got injured on Opening Day and never really found himself afterwards. After a highly successful first season in Atlanta following his offseason trade and extension, Sean Murphy appeared primed for another bump up in workload and, perhaps, a monster season. But, he strained his oblique on Opening Day, sidelining him for about two months. Though he eventually returned, he never really looked like himself at the plate, and ended up once again splitting more time with Travis d’Arnaud than many expected.
How acquired
Sean Murphy was famously traded to the Braves by the Athletics as part of a three-team deal in the 2022-2023 offseason. The Braves gave up a couple notable pitching prospects in the deal, with Freddy Tarnok and Kyle Muller, but neither have done much of anything at the major league level since. The headliner that the Braves sent out was William Contreras, but the Athletics made the especially-bizarre-in-retrospect decision to re-route him to Milwaukee because of a strange fixation with Esteury Ruiz, who still has yet to hit at even a league-average level and is entering his age 26 season.
Thanks to a surfeit of playing time, Milwaukee’s famous catcher defensive improvement training, and his own skills and progression, Contreras has developed into an absolute star in Milwaukee, however, and has another three years of team control with the Brewers. Contreras’ breakout may have made the Braves and Alex Anthopoulos rue to trade to some extent, but it’s not really clear if Contreras would’ve developed defensively the same way in Atlanta. (There has also been some rumbling that Braves pitchers disliked throwing to Contreras, but that could be whatever the equivalent of sour grapes when a guy is succeeding elsewhere is.) In any case, if Sean Murphy can get back to his pre-2024 level of production, then there won’t need to be any ill feelings in Atlanta about the deal. The clear loser in this trade was, and remains, the Athletics and it really didn’t have to be that way, although they do have a somewhat promising young(ish) former Braves prospect catcher of their own in Shea Langeliers, even as Contreras has far outplayed him to this point.
Shortly after acquiring Murphy, the Braves extended him for $73 million covering six years, including a seventh-year club option for $15 million with no buyout. Murphy had three years of team control remaining when acquired; the extension added three (and up to four) years of team control. Had Murphy not been extended, this upcoming campaign would’ve been his final arbitration-eligible season.
What were the expectations?
Murphy was essentially the best catcher in baseball on a per inning basis in 2023 — he had 5.2 fWAR as a catcher (actually more than his 4.9 fWAR on the season), and an absurd 7.5 fWAR per 600 PAs based on his catcher production. Only William Contreras was anywhere near (6.8/600), and only three other catchers exceeded the 5/600 mark.
Given that, and his track record, expectations were essentially that he’d be an elite backstop, with above-average offense (career 119 wRC+ coming into 2024; a near-.400 xwOBA last year) with top-tier defense (since his debut, no catcher had accrued more defensive value than Murphy through 2023, even though he was just eighth in innings caught). He got a 4.0 WAR in about 500 PAs projection central estimate from ZiPS, which ranked third on the team despite guys like Matt Olson and Michael Harris II projected to get more playing time.
All that aside, Murphy was coming off back-to-back 5ish WAR seasons, and had been solidly above average and then some his whole career. He was expected to be another star on a roster full of ‘em. We know how that turned out.
2024 Results
Murphy was the very first blood sacrifice the baseball gods required of the Braves this year: his season was immediately derailed by an oblique injury on Opening Day. He returned in late May, well into the point where the roster had already started its continual crumbling, and never really got going.
On the season, Murphy posted a sad 78 wRC+ and just 0.8 fWAR in 264 PAs. That’s a slightly below-average rate, and a lot of that below-average-ness was driven by another substantial wOBA-xwOBA gap. In 2023, Murphy had a near-.400 xwOBA but a .366 wOBA, but no one really cared that much because a .366 wOBA is really good. In 2024, his .308 xwOBA was basically average, but that same gap made his actual batting outputs look really bad.
His defense also dipped. For his career, Murphy has been an absurdly good framer; while he was still above-average in 2024, his framing runs accrual rate was less than a fourth of what it had been earlier. While he did have a great blocking season in a small sample, it was also the first time in his career he was a below-average thrower. Altogether, his fielding value went from an absurdly elite rate to a good, but nowhere near elite, one.
What went right
Murpy had a couple of nice moments and was still a solid major league catcher, but very little went right for him, compared to his 2023. One positive is that his walk and strikeout rates stayed mostly similar to his recent history, even if his strikeout rate took a slight tick up. Sometimes when guys have a collapse, part of it is that their plate discipline gets so bad that you can’t really salvage anything else, but that’s not really what happened with Murphy.
His blocking on the defensive end is really the only aspect of his game that stayed elite for Murphy in 2024, as it landed at the 97th percentile per Statcast. Even that may have been a tick off his 2024 pace (which was at the 100th percentile), but it was still a truly elite aspect of his game.
If there was a moment that could have signaled a return to form, it was the bolt from the blue off his bat on July 8. The Braves entered the ninth inning of that game down 3-1 to the Diamondbacks, and quickly made two outs in the air. Eddie Rosario followed by rolling a ball through the infield for a single, which brought up Murphy, who took two pitches, and then did this:
That homer extended the game into a crazy affair where both teams scored in the tenth and the Braves eventually made another run stand up in the 11th, but more importantly, it seemed like vintage big power, big homer Murphy.
Unfortunately, it really wasn’t much of a sign. Murphy had a .291 wOBA / .302 xwOBA coming into that game, and a .305 xwOBA that he somehow underhit by a whopping .040 afterwards.
What went wrong
Almost everything.
It all started with that Opening Day oblique injury. But, more than just knocking Murphy out for two months, the injury created a lot of uncertainty given how poorly Murphy played afterwards relative to his norm. Was the oblique, an injury type that is often said to entail a long and uneven recovery, the root cause of his struggles for the next four months? Or, perhaps more mildly, was the issue that he essentially had to re-start his season prep while the competition got into the swing of things? That’s the positive, optimistic scenario, that suggests Murphy will be back to his elite self next year, barring any further injury problems.
The problem is that even if this is likely, it isn’t certain. What if Murphy is just another catcher whose body wore down early due to the demands of the position? While catcher aging, in aggregate, is still a curve, it’s composed (like a lot of aging curves) of catchers who fell off the map at various “early” ages.
The way in which almost every aspect of Murphy’s game got noticeably-to-substantially worse doesn’t really help us figure out which it is. Murphy’s quality of contact dwindled to career-low rates; his approach also suffered with his normally aggressive tendencies becoming a lot more passive, even as his chase rate, which fell a ton his first year in Atlanta, bounced back up to where he was in 2021-2022. The biggest issue for Murphy, in some ways, was that he simply couldn’t get under the ball. Murphy generally takes gigantic hacks, but those hacks resulted in chipped, grounder contact far more often in 2024. Again, it’s not clear whether that’s an injury thing, an aging hand-eye coordination thing, or him playing catchup to the fact that most of his teammates spent the first few weeks hitting a ton of grounders too, but it’s what tanked his season. He actually hit fewer and fewer grounders as the season wore on, but it was clear that he was battling himself in terms of mechanics, swing decisions, and approach while doing so.
As far as approach goes, one of the issues really had to do with that confusing, increased passivity. Murphy is pretty much a fastball-masher; his entire career has been about destroying fastballs and doing not-so-badly on the other stuff to stay alive. One of his big gains in 2022-2023 was actually hitting the other stuff well without giving away (and in fact improving on) his fastball-mashing ability. In 2024, though, Murphy essentially stopped swinging at in-zone fastballs, even though that’s the whole praxis of his plate approach. It’s easy to say that whatever struggles ensued all stemmed from that idea, but again, it provides us no insight on whether 2025 will be a vast improvement just from the passage of time away from his injury. On the one hand, “swing at more fastballs” should be an obvious thing to do for him; on the other hand, he had multiple months to do that, and really only started doing it in September — even then, he actually posted a poor xwOBA against fastballs.
Month-to-month, Murphy actually had a better xwOBA in June and July than he did in August and September. He was actually hitting everything but breaking stuff well (when he deigned to swing at it) over those first two months, but then he started to struggle against changeups in August, and then had a harder time hitting fastballs when deciding to swing at them in September. It was a weird, confusing year for him when parsed down; the Braves will just really have to hope for a clean slate coming into 2025.
His pop time also dipped, along with his sprint speed (not that he was ever a burner), which could be attributed some to aging or to the oblique, or both.
One of Murphy’s most disappointing games came late in the year — two days after he hit one of his bigger homers of the year against the Royals. It was another big, close game. Down by two in the fourth with the tying runs in the corners, Murphy did the thing we highlighted for d’Arnaud as he wore down yesterday: somehow hit a fielder’s choice-out at home grounder to third on a fastball up above the letters. He had a chance to redeem himself with the tying runs on base again in the eighth, but, welp — this is probably not a 94 mph sinker that Murphy should be missing:
2025 outlook
One thing seems clear at this moment about Sean Murphy in 2025: he is in line for a lot of playing time. The Braves were reportedly planning on giving him the lion’s share of the playing time at catcher in 2024 before he got hurt. Now the Braves have let Travis d’Arnaud walk and both d’Arnaud and the other top option at catcher in free agency, Danny Jansen have signed elsewhere. Drake Baldwin is a big-time prospect at the position, but the reporting seems to indicate that he will start at Triple-A (though all such reporting should be taken with a grain of salt given how often the Braves seem to adjust their internal plans before the season gets underway). Every indicator is that the Braves plan for Murphy to play a ton in 2025.
It’s very hard for us to say whether I think that Murphy’s dip in production was from his injury or aging, but we would of course certainly hope for the former. One meaningful signal in answering this question is that the Braves are clearly not concerned about Murphy moving forwards, at least in the short term, otherwise they would likely have kept d’Arnaud around at his very reasonable club option price as insurance. That the organization’s posture is this committed and dependent on Sean Murphy in 2025 is quite a good sign for Murphy, and for them.
It is perfectly reasonable to think that his defense could get back to his baseline from the previous four seasons and while his career best 2023 at the plate may or may not be something he can return to, even his 2019-2022 level at the plate would be perfectly acceptable, with well above average production at the plate. If he can get back to that elite defense at catcher and good even if not great hitting again, he can easily return to legitimate star-level production in 2025.
ZiPS, for what it’s worth, has Murphy’s point estimate for 2025 as an above-average bat with good-not-elite defense, good for around 3 WAR in around 400 PAs, and above 4.5 WAR/600. Steamer is more pessimistic, seeing Murphy trending towards league average with the bat, which makes him more of a 3.5-4.0/600 guy.
<img alt="MLB: SEP 30 Mets at Braves - Game 2" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZZqytqL56AVUwdcPihqQqxM6SLg=/0x0:3600x2400/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73788207/2175288648.0.jpg">
Photo by David J. Griffin/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Atlanta’s star catcher got injured on Opening Day and never really found himself afterwards. After a highly successful first season in Atlanta following his offseason trade and extension, Sean Murphy appeared primed for another bump up in workload and, perhaps, a monster season. But, he strained his oblique on Opening Day, sidelining him for about two months. Though he eventually returned, he never really looked like himself at the plate, and ended up once again splitting more time with Travis d’Arnaud than many expected.
How acquired
Sean Murphy was famously traded to the Braves by the Athletics as part of a three-team deal in the 2022-2023 offseason. The Braves gave up a couple notable pitching prospects in the deal, with Freddy Tarnok and Kyle Muller, but neither have done much of anything at the major league level since. The headliner that the Braves sent out was William Contreras, but the Athletics made the especially-bizarre-in-retrospect decision to re-route him to Milwaukee because of a strange fixation with Esteury Ruiz, who still has yet to hit at even a league-average level and is entering his age 26 season.
Thanks to a surfeit of playing time, Milwaukee’s famous catcher defensive improvement training, and his own skills and progression, Contreras has developed into an absolute star in Milwaukee, however, and has another three years of team control with the Brewers. Contreras’ breakout may have made the Braves and Alex Anthopoulos rue to trade to some extent, but it’s not really clear if Contreras would’ve developed defensively the same way in Atlanta. (There has also been some rumbling that Braves pitchers disliked throwing to Contreras, but that could be whatever the equivalent of sour grapes when a guy is succeeding elsewhere is.) In any case, if Sean Murphy can get back to his pre-2024 level of production, then there won’t need to be any ill feelings in Atlanta about the deal. The clear loser in this trade was, and remains, the Athletics and it really didn’t have to be that way, although they do have a somewhat promising young(ish) former Braves prospect catcher of their own in Shea Langeliers, even as Contreras has far outplayed him to this point.
Shortly after acquiring Murphy, the Braves extended him for $73 million covering six years, including a seventh-year club option for $15 million with no buyout. Murphy had three years of team control remaining when acquired; the extension added three (and up to four) years of team control. Had Murphy not been extended, this upcoming campaign would’ve been his final arbitration-eligible season.
What were the expectations?
Murphy was essentially the best catcher in baseball on a per inning basis in 2023 — he had 5.2 fWAR as a catcher (actually more than his 4.9 fWAR on the season), and an absurd 7.5 fWAR per 600 PAs based on his catcher production. Only William Contreras was anywhere near (6.8/600), and only three other catchers exceeded the 5/600 mark.
Given that, and his track record, expectations were essentially that he’d be an elite backstop, with above-average offense (career 119 wRC+ coming into 2024; a near-.400 xwOBA last year) with top-tier defense (since his debut, no catcher had accrued more defensive value than Murphy through 2023, even though he was just eighth in innings caught). He got a 4.0 WAR in about 500 PAs projection central estimate from ZiPS, which ranked third on the team despite guys like Matt Olson and Michael Harris II projected to get more playing time.
All that aside, Murphy was coming off back-to-back 5ish WAR seasons, and had been solidly above average and then some his whole career. He was expected to be another star on a roster full of ‘em. We know how that turned out.
2024 Results
Murphy was the very first blood sacrifice the baseball gods required of the Braves this year: his season was immediately derailed by an oblique injury on Opening Day. He returned in late May, well into the point where the roster had already started its continual crumbling, and never really got going.
On the season, Murphy posted a sad 78 wRC+ and just 0.8 fWAR in 264 PAs. That’s a slightly below-average rate, and a lot of that below-average-ness was driven by another substantial wOBA-xwOBA gap. In 2023, Murphy had a near-.400 xwOBA but a .366 wOBA, but no one really cared that much because a .366 wOBA is really good. In 2024, his .308 xwOBA was basically average, but that same gap made his actual batting outputs look really bad.
His defense also dipped. For his career, Murphy has been an absurdly good framer; while he was still above-average in 2024, his framing runs accrual rate was less than a fourth of what it had been earlier. While he did have a great blocking season in a small sample, it was also the first time in his career he was a below-average thrower. Altogether, his fielding value went from an absurdly elite rate to a good, but nowhere near elite, one.
What went right
Murpy had a couple of nice moments and was still a solid major league catcher, but very little went right for him, compared to his 2023. One positive is that his walk and strikeout rates stayed mostly similar to his recent history, even if his strikeout rate took a slight tick up. Sometimes when guys have a collapse, part of it is that their plate discipline gets so bad that you can’t really salvage anything else, but that’s not really what happened with Murphy.
His blocking on the defensive end is really the only aspect of his game that stayed elite for Murphy in 2024, as it landed at the 97th percentile per Statcast. Even that may have been a tick off his 2024 pace (which was at the 100th percentile), but it was still a truly elite aspect of his game.
If there was a moment that could have signaled a return to form, it was the bolt from the blue off his bat on July 8. The Braves entered the ninth inning of that game down 3-1 to the Diamondbacks, and quickly made two outs in the air. Eddie Rosario followed by rolling a ball through the infield for a single, which brought up Murphy, who took two pitches, and then did this:
That homer extended the game into a crazy affair where both teams scored in the tenth and the Braves eventually made another run stand up in the 11th, but more importantly, it seemed like vintage big power, big homer Murphy.
Unfortunately, it really wasn’t much of a sign. Murphy had a .291 wOBA / .302 xwOBA coming into that game, and a .305 xwOBA that he somehow underhit by a whopping .040 afterwards.
What went wrong
Almost everything.
It all started with that Opening Day oblique injury. But, more than just knocking Murphy out for two months, the injury created a lot of uncertainty given how poorly Murphy played afterwards relative to his norm. Was the oblique, an injury type that is often said to entail a long and uneven recovery, the root cause of his struggles for the next four months? Or, perhaps more mildly, was the issue that he essentially had to re-start his season prep while the competition got into the swing of things? That’s the positive, optimistic scenario, that suggests Murphy will be back to his elite self next year, barring any further injury problems.
The problem is that even if this is likely, it isn’t certain. What if Murphy is just another catcher whose body wore down early due to the demands of the position? While catcher aging, in aggregate, is still a curve, it’s composed (like a lot of aging curves) of catchers who fell off the map at various “early” ages.
The way in which almost every aspect of Murphy’s game got noticeably-to-substantially worse doesn’t really help us figure out which it is. Murphy’s quality of contact dwindled to career-low rates; his approach also suffered with his normally aggressive tendencies becoming a lot more passive, even as his chase rate, which fell a ton his first year in Atlanta, bounced back up to where he was in 2021-2022. The biggest issue for Murphy, in some ways, was that he simply couldn’t get under the ball. Murphy generally takes gigantic hacks, but those hacks resulted in chipped, grounder contact far more often in 2024. Again, it’s not clear whether that’s an injury thing, an aging hand-eye coordination thing, or him playing catchup to the fact that most of his teammates spent the first few weeks hitting a ton of grounders too, but it’s what tanked his season. He actually hit fewer and fewer grounders as the season wore on, but it was clear that he was battling himself in terms of mechanics, swing decisions, and approach while doing so.
As far as approach goes, one of the issues really had to do with that confusing, increased passivity. Murphy is pretty much a fastball-masher; his entire career has been about destroying fastballs and doing not-so-badly on the other stuff to stay alive. One of his big gains in 2022-2023 was actually hitting the other stuff well without giving away (and in fact improving on) his fastball-mashing ability. In 2024, though, Murphy essentially stopped swinging at in-zone fastballs, even though that’s the whole praxis of his plate approach. It’s easy to say that whatever struggles ensued all stemmed from that idea, but again, it provides us no insight on whether 2025 will be a vast improvement just from the passage of time away from his injury. On the one hand, “swing at more fastballs” should be an obvious thing to do for him; on the other hand, he had multiple months to do that, and really only started doing it in September — even then, he actually posted a poor xwOBA against fastballs.
Month-to-month, Murphy actually had a better xwOBA in June and July than he did in August and September. He was actually hitting everything but breaking stuff well (when he deigned to swing at it) over those first two months, but then he started to struggle against changeups in August, and then had a harder time hitting fastballs when deciding to swing at them in September. It was a weird, confusing year for him when parsed down; the Braves will just really have to hope for a clean slate coming into 2025.
His pop time also dipped, along with his sprint speed (not that he was ever a burner), which could be attributed some to aging or to the oblique, or both.
One of Murphy’s most disappointing games came late in the year — two days after he hit one of his bigger homers of the year against the Royals. It was another big, close game. Down by two in the fourth with the tying runs in the corners, Murphy did the thing we highlighted for d’Arnaud as he wore down yesterday: somehow hit a fielder’s choice-out at home grounder to third on a fastball up above the letters. He had a chance to redeem himself with the tying runs on base again in the eighth, but, welp — this is probably not a 94 mph sinker that Murphy should be missing:
2025 outlook
One thing seems clear at this moment about Sean Murphy in 2025: he is in line for a lot of playing time. The Braves were reportedly planning on giving him the lion’s share of the playing time at catcher in 2024 before he got hurt. Now the Braves have let Travis d’Arnaud walk and both d’Arnaud and the other top option at catcher in free agency, Danny Jansen have signed elsewhere. Drake Baldwin is a big-time prospect at the position, but the reporting seems to indicate that he will start at Triple-A (though all such reporting should be taken with a grain of salt given how often the Braves seem to adjust their internal plans before the season gets underway). Every indicator is that the Braves plan for Murphy to play a ton in 2025.
It’s very hard for us to say whether I think that Murphy’s dip in production was from his injury or aging, but we would of course certainly hope for the former. One meaningful signal in answering this question is that the Braves are clearly not concerned about Murphy moving forwards, at least in the short term, otherwise they would likely have kept d’Arnaud around at his very reasonable club option price as insurance. That the organization’s posture is this committed and dependent on Sean Murphy in 2025 is quite a good sign for Murphy, and for them.
It is perfectly reasonable to think that his defense could get back to his baseline from the previous four seasons and while his career best 2023 at the plate may or may not be something he can return to, even his 2019-2022 level at the plate would be perfectly acceptable, with well above average production at the plate. If he can get back to that elite defense at catcher and good even if not great hitting again, he can easily return to legitimate star-level production in 2025.
ZiPS, for what it’s worth, has Murphy’s point estimate for 2025 as an above-average bat with good-not-elite defense, good for around 3 WAR in around 400 PAs, and above 4.5 WAR/600. Steamer is more pessimistic, seeing Murphy trending towards league average with the bat, which makes him more of a 3.5-4.0/600 guy.
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