Sean Murphy: Too Valuable Not to Trade?

Sean Murphy survived the A's trading sprees before the season and at the Trade Deadline, but can he make it through another winter?

This offseason I want to shine a light on a number of players, because there were a lot of strides made on an individual basis, so I’ll be taking a look at prior seasons and how that compares with 2022, plus going into where they had trouble and where they might be able to improve.

Today, I'm starting off with A's catcher Sean Murphy. 

He’s a tricky one, because the first two years that he was in the big leagues were in 2019, where he got into 20 games, and then in the shortened 2020 season. 2021 was his first full season in the big leagues. Because of that, I’m only going to be giving his stats from last year instead of a three-year overview.

In 2021 Murph hit. .216 with a .306 OBP and a .710 OPS. That made him roughly league average at the plate overall. His Baseball Savant page had some red on it, most notably in Max Exit Velocity, where he ranked in the 87th percentile, and defensively with his pop time to second ranking in the 97% and his framing coming in at 82%.

2021, Baseball Savant

2022, Baseball Savant

He also struck out in 25.4% of his ABs and walked 8.9% of the time.

This season Murphy improved dramatically. The only blue on his Savant page was his sprint speed. Everywhere else he saw huge gains, like his xBA went from the 28th percentile to the 62nd. His chase rate was 13% better, his whiff% was 26 points better. His walk rate went up slightly to 9.2%, and his strikeout rate went down 5% to just over 20%.

In the second half of the season he hit 20 points higher than he did in the first half, and his walk rate nearly doubled from 6.8 to 12.1%. He was also 40% better than league average in the second half after being 8% better in the first half.

Sean Murphy had one heck a season, and honestly, it’s hard to make those improvements when you’re still fairly new to the league and have suddenly become one of the focal points of the entire offense.

Trading away Matt Olson and Matt Chapman, then letting Starling Marte and Mark Canha walk took away nearly half the A’s lineup this winter and put a lot more pressure on guys like Murphy and Seth Brown to carry the load.

In the first half they struggled a bit, but in the second half they seemed to embrace their roles and make adjustments, leading to much better play after the All-Star game.

It also looks like Murph may have been taking a different approach to the ball on his swing plane this season, which led to more contact overall. Baseball Savant had him with a 17 degree launch angle against fastballs last season, and that went down to 10 degrees this season.

He also hit heaters four-tenths of a mph less that less season, but those little adjustments led to 2.5% fewer whiffs, fewer popups, and more line drives in 2022.

Areas Of Improvement

It’s hard to nitpick Sean Murphy after the season he just had, but that’s what I’m here to do.

In his pitch-by-pitch metrics, two offerings gave him the most trouble. The good news is that they have similar mechanics: the slider and the cutter.

He hit .192 against cutters and .221 against sliders this season. That’s the bad news. The good news is that his xBA against cutters was 30 points higher at .222, and his xBA against sliders was a solid .254–which is higher than his actual .250 batting average from 2022.

Expected stats don’t mean much to the stat line, but they do give us an idea of the quality of contact someone is making on certain pitches. The trick is that Murph has to make contact on those pitches. He whiffed on 30.3% of sliders this year, the highest of any pitch. It was also the most often used put-away pitch against him.

If we want him to focus on just one of these pitches, the slider is definitely the one to choose because he saw those nearly as often as fastballs, with 646 fastballs and 639 sliders going his way this season. Those two pitches accounted for 54% of the pitches thrown to Sean Murphy in 2022, so if he can improve against sliders, then the sky is legitimately the limit for him in 2023 and beyond.

Defensively, Sean Murphy is already one of the elite catchers in the game, so no notes there.

Honestly the best plan for Murphy is to keep making those strides and just stay healthy. The rest will take care of itself. 

Trade Incoming? 

Sean Murphy is one of a few trade candidates that the A’s have this winter, and he may be the last one that could bring back a haul big enough to change the perception of the farm system.

That alone is the argument for trading him.

There is also the much less likely scenario where they sign him to some sort of an extension. The Atlanta Braves sign guys to extensions all the time!

He has shown enough to make you believe he will be worth a deal, but at the same time his injury history has to be a little scary for the front office to commit to Murphy long-term when they don't necessarily need to just yet.

If he were to stick around for 2023, one way to keep him fresh would be to do what the A’s did down the stretch with Murphy once Shea Langeliers got the call to Oakland, and that would be to have both of them in the lineup most days, with one catching and one at DH.

While I’d love to keep Murphy, there are a few drawbacks to that plan. The first is that Murphy didn’t hit nearly as well as a DH. In 129 PA, he hit just .179 with a .271 OBP and a .584 OPS. 

As a catcher, he hit .269 with a .348 OBP and a .805 OPS. The DH numbers are obviously a small sample size, so it could be worth it to roll with the catcher, designated hitter platoon.

But there is also the roster crunch factor that I think plays a bigger roll than his numbers at DH. If Langeliers and Murphy are essentially swapping DH duties back and forth, that’s fewer rest days for other guys that can see their bats in the lineup. Guys like Dermis Garcia and Jordan Diaz are either in the field or they’re not playing.

I think that the A’s and Mark Kotsay would love to keep Murph around, but the roster flexibility and the ability to bring in waiver claims for a quick audition, regardless of position, is pretty valuable too. 

Murphy just turned 28, and I think the time is now to make a decision on the direction of the club. Do they want to flirt with possibility of being a 70-something win team next season? If so, Murphy’s bat, defense, and leadership behind the dish could go a long way towards achieving that goal.

If the plan is to have Langeliers be the guy for the next upswing, then getting him reps to learn the pitching staff and reps at the plate before it's time for the A's to contend are invaluable. There is one thing you can’t get back, and that’s time.

The A’s also have a ton of catchers in their system, and while some could be used as trade bait, having two starting catchers at the big league level really hinders the progress that all the other catchers in the minor leagues can make too. The catchers at Triple-A wouldn't be able to get promoted, and if they're not getting promotions, then the guys in Double-A are also not getting promoted to Triple-A, and so on. 

Murphy isn’t 100% gone this offseason, but I’d say the odds are over 50% that the front office tries to move him before the start of spring training. 

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