There's An Obvious Solution for a Sean Murphy Rebound in 2025
The Braves need to lean hard on their $73M backstop, for the first time in his Braves career
The Atlanta Braves made the postseason despite extensive injuries that decimated1 the major league roster.
The first of those injuries was to catcher Sean Murphy, who left the seventh inning of game one with an oblique strain that sidelined him for 58 days. The Opening Day lineup was never intact again, as Murphy returned to action three days after Ronald Acuña Jr. left a game against the Pittsburgh Pirates with a torn ACL and missed the rest of the season.
And when Murphy returned, he wasn’t the same.
Murphy hit just .193 last season, a career-worst mark, as was his .636 OPS. It’s a surprising dropoff from a 2023 All-Star nod, where the backstop opened the year with a .306/.400/.599 line and 17 homers. Since the 2023 ASB, Murphy’s hit just .181 with 14 homers.
There are some understandable mitigating factors here, but with Murphy’s salary jumping from $9M to $15M this upcoming season, the Braves need to get him going at the plate.
(We covered this same topic on the Braves Today podcast, embedded here for your listening pleasure. Go subscribe and leave us a five-star review, if so inclined!)
What happened to Sean Murphy in 2024?
It’s very clear that the veteran backstop never got into midseason form after the early injury. Manager Brian Sntiker alluded to that, saying over the summer that he was in essence “going through spring training all over again” in his ramp-up from the oblique injury that came in his third at-bat of the season.
But it’s very clear when you dive ‘under the hood’ that Murphy was never fully recovered from the oblique - he struggled both offensively and defensively in ways that not only had he not struggled before, but also are very easy to understand from the perspective of a player dealing with lingering soreness and/or weakness in an oblique muscle.
Offensively, some of Murphy’s struggles stemmed from unexpected difficulty with velocity. Murph’s always been able to hit heaters, with his season-by-season batting averages against fastballs ranging from a high of .333 (2019) to .245, at worst (.2021).
This year? .183.
While he didn’t whiff at higher rates than normal - his 21.5% whiff rate was in line with his career norms against heaters - he just wasn’t able to do nearly as much damage as in previous seasons2. Murph’s slugging against fastballs was just .342, 119 points below his previous career low (.456 in 2022).
It’s likely that lingering physical effects from the injury, combined with his timing being off, contributed to this - his performance against breaking pitches (.211) was almost identical to last season (.210), but Murphy just wasn’t able to get around on fastballs quick enough to be effective.
He also wasn’t able to elevate the ball like normal, with a career-high 53.3% ground ball rate that was significantly higher than both his career norm of 43.3% and last season’s 41.4% rate.
The injury manifested in his defensive metrics, as well. While Murphy remained an exceptional blocker, his caught stealing rate cratered3, bottoming out at just 11% this season (-2 CS Above Average on Statcast) after finishing 2023 at 20% and a +4 CS Above Average. While his exchange and arm strength were largely the same from year to year, his pop time went from a 2nd-best 1.89 to a 25th-best 1.94 seconds.
But it feels like there’s a pretty obvious fix to Murphy’s offensive struggles, health permitting:
Murphy needs to play more
We now have two prominent data points for Murphy that point to him producing more when he gets a heavy share of the playing time.
The best full season of his career was 2022 with the Oakland A’s, where he received down-ballot MVP votes after hitting .250 with a .759 OPS and 18 homers in 148 games. While his defense was one of the reasons why he was on the MVP boards, grading out as the third-best catcher in all of baseball with a +11 Run Value, his offense was impressive when you consider the supporting cast around him4 on an Oakland team that lost 102 games and hit just .216 as a group.
And in that season, the summer was Murphy’s hottest two months of the year - Sean hit .299 with a .905 OPS in July and .330 with a .975 OPS in August.
He also played a lot during that stretch - Murphy started 49 games in those two months, 39 at catcher and ten at designated hitter. With the exception of a pinch-hit appearance on August 14th, Murphy didn’t miss a start from game two of a doubleheader on July 29th until game two of a doubleheader on August 30th, batting .313 across that span.
While Murphy can’t repeat that cadence in the Atlanta heat, which is usually 17° to 20°hotter in July than it is in Oakland, he can definitely be used more than he has been so far in Atlanta.
We even have anecdotal evidence that heavy workloads for the Braves have allowed him to get into an offensive groove at the plate. When Travis d’Arnaud suffered a concussion in early April of 2023, missing 29 days, Murphy started 24 games and hit .302 with a 1.126 OPS, playing in all but three of Atlanta’s games during the stretch.5
Health permitting, it’s clear that Murphy needs to play more.
Part of this comes down to performance - Snitker remarked in late July that Travis d’Arnaud was playing more than Murphy at the moment because of offense, explaining that for d’Arnaud, “He’s been swinging the bat pretty good, and that’s what we’re looking for right now. Runs are hard to come by. […] if you’re gonna hit, you’re gonna play.”
Murphy’s been shown to hit more when he gets more frequent at-bats, but it’s understandable that Atlanta was looking for anyone to get going over the summer.
SIDEBAR: The frustrating thing is how streaky the offense was from behind the plate - Atlanta’s catchers hit .222 as a group, with d’Arnaud performing better overall than Murphy: Travis hit .239 BA with 15 HRs to Murphy’s .193 and 10 homers, but seven of d’Arnaud’s homers came in just three multi-homer games and the veteran hit just .184 with a .583 OPS from August 1st through the end of the season.
Maybe playing catcher in the major leagues is just hard?
There’s also the likelihood that, like Kevin Seitzer said in his post-firing remarks, that Murphy was pressing when he got back in the lineup. His chase rate was up 4.9% to 27.9%, but he also had 7.1% less swings in the zone as opposing pitchers gave the Braves less hittable pitches.
It’s clear that the lingering effects of the oblique injury were impacting Murphy’s offense and defense last season, and it’s entirely reasonable to expect a fully healthy 2025 to allow Murphy to show why the organization traded away multiple players to sign and extend him in late 2022.
That is, if he plays enough.
The historical definition of “decimate” is “kill, destroy, or remove one in every ten” so I’d argue that “decimate” is actually underselling Atlanta’s injuries last season.
It’s entirely possible that some of Atlanta’s trademark batted-ball bad luck hit Murphy here, as well. He significantly underperformed his expected stats in every respect: BA .183 vs xBA of .242, SLG of .342 vs xSLG of .465, and wOBA of .290 vs xwOBA of .353
The counterpoint here on the caught stealing is his expected numbers were 14% in 2023 and 16% this year, so an opposite trend of the actual numbers - I don’t know if the sample sizes were too small or what’s up with that.
Murphy’s batting average led all Oakland qualifiers by 13 points, while his 18 homers were ahead of all but Seth Brown’s 25. The numbers aren’t impressive in a vacuum, but in the proper context, it’s obvious that he wasn’t getting a lot of lineup protection or run support from his teammates.
Yes, even doubleheaders. Murphy played in both games of a DH against the Mets on May 1st, going 4-7 with 2 HRs, 6 RBI, and 3 runs scored on the day as Atlanta split with New York.