Sean Murphy: Ottoneu P/G Faller

Over the last couple of weeks, I wrote about 1st and 2nd half splits, looking at one big gainer (Mike Burrows) and one big faller (Kodai Senga). Today, I turn my attention to the plate, with a first look at a hitter who fell off.

As with pitchers, I started this by pulling every hitter who met a minimum of playing time – in this case, 100 PA – in both the first- and second-half of the season. I then looked at each player’s change in points per game between the halves. This gave me 274 players whose P/G changed by anywhere from +4.33 to -3.70 from the first-half to the second. As with pitchers, change is to be expected. Just 20 of the 275 hitters had a P/G change of 0.10 or less, and only 42 had a change of 0.25 P/G or less. Of the 275, 126 (46%) gained or lost at least a full point per game.

It’s also important to remember that half-season splits are by definition small samples and we shouldn’t get caught up in the surface level changes. While big second half breakouts or collapses will always create off-season chatter, the change in production isn’t, in and of itself, a reason to buy or sell a player. It is a reason to dig in and see if we can find a deeper reason to buy or sell a player.

With Senga, his injuries looked like a valid justification for a poor second-half from which he might bounce back, while a drop in Stuff+ from 2024 to 2025 is cause for real concern. With Burrows, a change in pitch mix and the possibility for further refinement in the off-season have me intrigued. Those are the kinds of things we will look for with hitters, as well.

Sean Murphy – Lost 3.70 P/G, from 5.07 to 1.37

To say that is a precipitous drop is an understatement. Any catcher over 5 points per game is cause for celebration. Any player under 4 P/G (let alone under 2 P/G or 1.5 P/G) is cause for a drop. And managers responded. Murphy was nearly universally rostered when the season started and is now on less than 2/3rds of rosters (63%) as we go through arbitration.

The issues with Murphy’s overall season are fairly obvious. He came into the year with a career 23.2% K-rate and then struck out in 31.2% of PA this year. Never a high-BABIP guy, his .243 this season still feels pretty low, given the career .271 mark prior to the 2025 season.

When I see a big gain in strikeouts with a big loss of BABIP, I wonder about bat speed and chase rate. Lower bat speed can lead to lower quality of contact, decreasing BABIP, and can also represent an inability to keep up with heat, leading to more swing and miss. This can also encourage a player to make earlier swing decisions to try to make up for the lost bat speed, leading to more chase. And more chase can both create more swing and miss and lead to more soft contact.

Murphy did suffer a bat-speed decline, going from 74.4 mph with 47.2% fast swings in 2023 to 73.3/39% in 2024 and 72.6/31% this year. And he did swing and miss more, but the story gets more complicated after that.

The increase in swing and miss was almost entirely on pitches he chased, as his O-contact dropped to a career low 45.2%. His O-swing, Z-swing, Z-contact, and even zone and first-strike rates all seem pretty typical for his career. Almost his entire increase in K-rate seems to have come from swinging and missing more often when he chases.

When you look at his batted ball quality, you see something somewhat similar. On the surface, things actually look okay – 89.1 mph EV is just a bit below his 89.5 career mark; his 42.9% hard hit rate is actually just above his 42.4% career mark; and his 13.2% barrel rate is the second best of his career, easily above his 12.0% career rate. That is a little misleading, as that is barrels per batted ball event, and the added strikeouts means that his barrel per PA fell, but even that didn’t fall that far, landing at 7.4% in 2025 vs. a 7.6% career rate.

The somewhat similar thing, though, is a really different profile on chases. On pitches in the zone, Murphy’s contact was basically as good as ever. His EV and barrels per BBE were right in line with career norms. But on pitches outside the zone, his EV (72) was more than 7 mph slower than his next worst season (79.5 mph in 2022) and he didn’t have a single barrel. To be fair, it is not easy to barrel a ball outside the zone, and Murphy has had a 0.0% barrel rate on these pitches multiple times in his career. But his quality of contact was much, much worse.

But it is probably time to address the elephant in the room – Murphy’s hip. Murphy was shut down for surgery in early September with a labrum tear that he had apparently been dealing with for three years. And that makes all of this hard to parse. Murphy’s bat speed is on a multi-year decline, but he was playing with an injury that entire time. He adjusted his stance this year, getting more open and further from the plate, but was that a failed adjustment or an attempt to manage pain/discomfort?

The fact that his quality of contact in the zone was similar and that his strikeout issues mostly revolved around really low contact rates outside the zone gives me some hope that Murphy can put this behind him and rebound to being the guy we had come to expect. Given what I found today, the thing I will be tracking in spring training is his bat speed and his contact rate on pitches outside the zone. If those numbers are looking good, I will be prepared to buy back in.

If you can’t wait until then to make a call, I would call my attitude from now until the cut deadline (or in early auctions) “hesitant but optimistic.” I am going to be intrigued by cheap Murphy, but I think something in the $5 range is about all I am likely to be comfortable with, for now.