The Braves have got the catcher Shaun Murphy from reports ESPN’s Jeff Bassin. It’s actually a three-difference trade, per Basanwith William Contreras Go to breweries and Manny Pina To the. right-handed possibility Freddie Trunnock You’ll be moving from Atlanta to Oakland, ET FanSided’s Robert Murray. Players will also get an outfielder Esteore Ruiz From Milwaukee, per Murray. Joel Sherman from the New York Post adds that Joel Byamps And the Justin Yeager You’re going to breweries. ESPN’s Kelly McDaniel reports left Kyle Mueller Going to Auckland. It is not yet known if this is the full deal or if there are more players involved.
The move finally ends a commercial saga that has been going on for almost a year now. After the 2021 season, the A’s were so bent in a rebuild that they traded away Matt OlsonAnd the Matt ChapmanAnd the Sean Manea And the Chris Bassett before opening with Frankie Montas Flipped into the 2022 deadline.
Murphy was widely seen as the next to go for a number of reasons. First, he just passed three years of MLB service time in 2022 and will now be paid higher by arbitration. MLBTR contributor Matt Schwartz Murphy is expected to jump to $3.5 million in 2023 with two more applicants before he reaches free agency after 2025. Second, the A’s received an excellent pickup opportunity from Atlanta in Olson’s deal. Shea Langlers. He had a stellar season at Triple-A and held himself well in 40 games for the first time in a major. Given all of these factors, it seemed more and more likely that the Specialists would hand the job over to Langeliers and trade Murphy for improvements elsewhere on the roster.
By taking this path, players A part ways with one of the best players in the game. The 28-year-old Murphy has 330 major league games under his belt so far and has performed well in almost every aspect of the game. He hits 46 home runs and has a combined hitting streak of .236/.326/.429. This production leads to a WRC+ of 116, which indicates that it was 16% higher than the league batting average and even ahead of the average catcher, since they generally come in a bit lower than the others. He’s also taken a step further in 2022, making just 20.3% of his plate appearances after passing 25% in his career prior to that.
Defensively, Murphy gets rave reviews, too. Since the start of 2020, he has recorded 13 defensive points saved behind the plate, a number that puts him in the top 10 in the league. FanGraphs’ framing metric gives it a 19.5 in that time frame, the third highest such tally. Those all-around contributions have allowed him to produce 10 wins above replacement in those three seasons, according to FanGraphs, second among all MLB players with only JT Realmoto in front of him.
More is coming.
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