Prior entries:
- Matt Olson
- Michael Harris II
- Ozzie Albies
- Bryce Elder
- Austin Riley
- Drake Baldwin
- Ronald Acuña Jr.
- Chris Sale
- Spencer Strider
- Jurickson Profar
- Grant Holmes
Ah, Sean Murphy. There’s a long tradition of guys being the guy to draw the most rancor debate-wise in Braves fandom, and, well, Sean Murphy bears that mantle now. No one was complaining about Murphy shortly into the 2023 season, or in the aftermath of that season, but things haven’t gone great for him since.
Murphy got hurt on Opening Day of 2024, and seemed pretty impaired after returning, something that the bat speed data easily confirms. In 2025, Murphy didn’t even wait until Opening Day, suffering a fractured rib in Spring Training. At this point, you all know how that season ended: with Murphy finally calling it quits on trying to play through a hip labrum issue that had apparently been bugging him for much of or all of his entire Braves tenure. Oy. What happens now, with playing time far less guaranteed than before given the emergence of Drake Baldwin, is murky.
Career-to-date, status
Murphy was having a quiet-yet-monstrous career when the Braves traded for him, as he had amassed 10.5 fWAR in 1,260 PAs while playing in Oakland for parts of four seasons, including a massive 5.2 fWAR/612 PA campaign immediately before the trade. He was stellar both offensively (.343 xwOBA) and defensively (basically plus two wins per season, inclusive of positional adjustment), and if anything, his value was actually tamped down relative to his inputs because he substantially underhit his xwOBA in both 2021 and 2022.
After coming to Atlanta, the Braves seemingly gave him carte blanche to do his whole “swing incredibly hard in case you hit it” shtick, and he exploded with a .393 xwOBA while continuing to play elite defense. He earned 5.0 fWAR in just 438 PAs — that’s a nearly 7 WAR/600 rate for those that don’t want to do division and multiplication themselves. Again, Murphy substantially underhit his xwOBA despite dominating on the field.
Even before that new gear of performance in a new uniform, the Braves signed Murphy to a six-year, $73 million extension. Murphy is earning $15 million annual salaries through 2028, with a no-buyout club option for the same in 2029 as well.
Anyway, 2023 was awesome, but then the aforementioned injuries hit. In addition to coming back from those, Murphy turned 31 last October, so he’s likely in the latter half of his career at this point.
Recent performance
Nothing went right for Murphy in 2024, and it seems like he was playing hurt. He also continued to underhit his xwOBA, so while the griping about his circumstances goes beyond whether or not he gets his just deserts, there’s an undercurrent of “maybe we should be discussing if Sean Murphy has a slice or whatever like we did endlessly with Marcell Ozuna” there too. Murphy was still good defensively in 2024, but not as good as in 2023 and before. His bat speed collapsed, and his offensive profile, which was built around doing damage on contact, went with it. He tallied 0.8 fWAR in 264 PAs in 2024, though if you knock the xwOBA underperformance out, that probably would’ve doubled by my very rough math.
2025 was an improvement as he rebounded defensively, and also, he finally stopped being plagued by xwOBA underperformance. Unfortunately, his xwOBA ended up largely the same as 2024, and his bat speed collapsed even further. The rest of the offensive signs were all kind of a jumble — his contact quality actually rebounded, but he started missing pitches. It’s hard to say what was an adjustment to playing hurt, what was an adjustment to new offensive instruction the team received, what was natural variation in a small sample, and so on. It’s easier to note that Murphy had a no-complaints-here .352 wOBA / .332 xwOBA through the end of July, and then basically stopped hitting at all afterwards — even though this story, too, is made more complicated by the fact that he started swinging way harder while flailing. There are mixed signals there, but fundamentally, it was Murphy’s defense keeping him productive and valuable in 2025, especially as hit bat slipped and he called it quits down the stretch.
Forecasting
Boy, this is another toughie. You have to factor in Murphy’s health (whether for good or for ill relative to his 2024-2025 performance) but also, separately, the availability of playing time. Murphy probably shouldn’t be DHing, but he might, and how often he DHes also has meaty implications for his value due to the huge swing between his ability to rack up defensive value and the massive DH penalty to WAR.
IWAG basically thinks that Murphy will, for reasons other than season-ending hip surgery that was probably needed years ago, replicate 2025. The combination of injury-affecting-performance, persistent-ish xwOBA underperformance (look at that career .327/.345 gap in over 2,000 PAs), and the mess of signals that was his 2025 season appears to be pushing towards the system’s version of a “shrug, who knows, just stick with what happened more recently.” That’s fairly consistent with Steamer (albeit with better defense) and comes in well below ZiPS, which sees more of an offensive bounceback.
In some ways, the two humps here on the raw WAR chart are really just “Murphy is worth playing all the time” and “Murphy isn’t worth playing all the time.” It’ll be better for the team if he forces the Braves to make tough decisions about how often Drake Baldwin plays, but there’s a substantial likelihood that the combination of his availability and performance level give him useful backup levels of production and not much else.
Your turn
Alright, I’ve given you the info. Well, some info. You may have your own info. With that, I ask you:
- How confident are you in your choice? Go with a scale from 1-5, where 3 is “I dunno, reasonably confident,” 5 is certain, and 1 is “I am participating but have no confidence in my choice and don’t want the fact that it will likely be incorrect to affect my place in any theoretical standings all that much.”
- Rounded to the nearest fWAR, how much will Sean Murphy produce in 2026?