An Ode To Daniel Murphy, The Self-Aware Baseball Rat Who Was Briefly The Best Player On The Planet

Daniel Murphy has always been unusually self-aware for a major leaguer. Which meant Murphy, like everyone else watching baseball on planet Earth, was surprised when he produced one of the greatest postseason runs of all-time in October 2015.

Murphy sparked the Mets’ run to the World Series by homering in a playoff-record six straight games — the final two games of the NL Division Series against the Dodgers and all four games of the NL Championship Series against the Cubs — and earning NLCS MVP honors by hitting a stupendous .529 in the sweep.

His first five homers came against the quintet of Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke, Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta and Kyle Hendricks. Arrieta, Greinke and Kershaw finished 1-2-3 in the Cy Young balloting while Hendricks led the league in ERA. The five pitchers combined to face 4,176 batters during the regular season and gave up 70 homers — or one homer every 59.7 at-bats.

Murphy knew long before October 2015 he was better than most of us thought — and if we’re being frank here, better than most Mets decision-makers thought — but better than anyone who ever swung a bat in a playoff game? That was crazy talk.

“Yeah, I’m surprised,” Murphy said following the pennant-clinching win at Wrigley Field on Oct. 21. “Each time I’ve been able to put a swing on a ball and it goes out of the ballpark. I feel like I’ve been in stretches where I’ve put good swings on balls but they’re singles and they’re doubles.

“I can’t explain it. It’s just a blessing.”

An entire career should not be distilled down to six games, no matter how good they were. But for Murphy, who retired Friday, those half-dozen games were defining as much for the journey they represented as for what they yielded.

Prior to October 2015, Murphy was known as a baseball rat who willed himself to become an unorthodox regular. The spacious confines of Citi Field overwhelmed just about every player in a Mets uniform in the first half of the decade, but Murphy was a natural and comfortable enough hitter to accept what the dimensions gave him — mostly singles and gap-splitting doubles — as opposed to obsessing over what the dimensions would not provide. Murphy was one of just five big leaguers to collect at least 400 plate appearances while batting at least .280 every year from 2011 through 2015.

But he wasn’t Adrian Beltre, Miguel Cabrera or Robinson Cano (the fifth member of the club: Fellow pure-hitter-without-a-position and recent retiree Howie Kendrick). You didn’t need to check out the advanced metrics to wonder how long the bat would carry the defense. The Mets tried Murphy at first base, third base and left field before settling on him at second base, where, just in case you want to check out the advanced metrics, he graded out at 50 runs below average per Baseball Info Solutions from 2011-15.

Then there was the adventurous baserunning, which held the promise of high comedy every time Murphy put the ball in play. As Murphy said to SNY.tv Friday: “I would get some base hits and then I’d run the bases like I was invisible.”

Perhaps Murphy, who turned 30 in 2015 and was due to hit free agency following the season, would have begun vanishing without a monstrous six-game spurt in which the entire world got to see and hear from the baseball rat with a savant-like knowledge of seemingly every game he ever saw, never mind played in.

“The first time I met Dan Murphy, I was the field coordinator here and he got his knee torn up in the last game of spring training (2010) and I didn’t know him,” then-Mets manager Terry Collins said during the 2015 NLCS. “On our travels, I’d go to St. Lucie to see our teams down there, and Dan Murphy’s at the rookie league game in the morning and the St. Lucie game at night. And all he talks about is baseball, so I’m not shocked that Dan Murphy is aware of every single pitch that happens during the game.”

Murphy was a nearly nightly presence in the interview room in those first two rounds, which was a treat because inevitably he’d run out of words to try and put his feats into context and instead describe, in vivid detail, what he and everyone else did.

For instance: Here’s Murphy on his Game 2 homer against Arrieta.

“I think for me, my at-bat started long before that with ‘Grandy’ (Curtis Granderson). Grandy was able to see some pitches, wins that AB with the base hit, and David (Wright) puts a good swing on that ball. And all of a sudden you look up after eight to 10 pitches and two batters, we’ve got a 1-0 lead and David’s in scoring position. I’m really looking to hook something to the second baseman or first baseman.

“Put a swing on the 0-0 heater, swung through it. He threw it by me. And then I think I got a cutter that I pulled foul, a heater away that I didn’t go in. It was close, then a breaking ball that I was just able to keep fair.”

While Murphy’s surge came after he’d established himself as a solid everyday big leaguer, the Mets’ opponent in the World Series made for easy comparisons to Buddy Biancalana, the light-hitting Royals shortstop who hit .278 with a pair of RBIs in the 1985 World Series as Kansas City won its first title. Biancalana never rediscovered his World Series form and has spent his post-playing years working with baseball players and golfers to try and condition their minds to expect to perform their best at the most important times.

“I played the best I ever played in my life during that Series (and) 19 months later, I was out of the major leagues — I just didn’t understand it,” Biancalana told me during the World Series. “I saw a quote (of Murphy) saying he has no idea how he’s doing it and that’s typically the case.”

Murphy returned to the land of mere mortals during the World Series, when he was 3-for-20 as the Mets were beaten by the Royals in five games. But Murphy figured out a way to channel his self-confidence and self-awareness into playing at a previously unimaginable high level during the 2016 and 2017 seasons — especially against the Mets, who never made him a contract offer before he signed a three-year deal with the division rival Nationals.

Murphy should have won the NL MVP in 2016, when he led the league with a .595 slugging percentage, a .985 OPS and 47 doubles while hitting .347 with 25 homers and 104 RBIs for the Nationals, who finished seven games behind the Mets in 2015 but won the division by eight games over the Mets in 2016. He was almost as good in 2017, when the Nationals won the NL East again as Murphy again led the NL in doubles with 43 while hitting .322 with 23 homers and 93 RBIs.

Murphy was especially prolific against the Mets, whom he dominated to the tune of a .395 average with 24 extra-base hits — including nine homers — and 35 RBIs in just 140 at-bats from 2016-17. He had a hit in all 16 games against the Mets in 2016, the longest single-season streak by a Mets opponent in franchise history. It got to the point where he was like Babe Ruth, if Ruth was too modest to tell everyone where he was going to hit the home run.

He produced those numbers with a cold ruthlessness never seen in New York. He knew he was an elite player, playing for a team he made elite because the Mets saw him at his best and inexplicably decided they’d be better off without him.

Murphy was just as self-aware during the many postgame interview sessions where reporters tried without success to get him to say how much he enjoyed beating the Mets. There was no need to say anything inflammatory and no need to take the bait cast. Murphy was able to say it all without saying anything of note.

“I think you’re always motivated against a division rival,” Murphy said after hitting a first-inning grand slam in a 6-3 win over the Mets on Apr 23, 2017. “I mean, you’re going to play these guys 19 times. You play the Braves, the Marlins. And so when you play a division team, when one team goes in one direction, the other team’s going in the other one. So the games are I think of the utmost importance.”

Murphy began declining in 2018, when he missed more than two months following knee surgery and hit a mere .299 with 12 homers and 42 RBIs between the Nationals and Cubs. Signing a two-year deal with the Rockies seemed to offer Murphy a chance to regain his video game numbers while playing half his games at Coors Field, but he suffered a broken finger early in the 2019 season and finished with an OPS+ of 88 before losing his starting job while producing just one extra-base hits in his final 85 at-bats of the 2020 campaign.

The easy self-awareness remained, though. As Murphy told SNY.tv Friday, he knew he was done last season when he could barely make it down the first base line. He’ll be 36 shortly after the scheduled start of the 2021 season and surely could have found someone willing to give him a shot at DH. But he knew he’d never again be the Murph of old, just an older Murph.

“Have you seen my numbers these last few years?” he told SNY.tv. “I wouldn’t say I was a major league player.”

But for six games — and then two more years — he was a lot more than that.