Regular-season Daniel Murphy is an OK player. Pretty good, even. If we really want to stretch, we can say he might even be quite good.
But postseason Daniel Murphy? He's something else, man. Just going off the evidence, he's a historic postseason slugger who's basically the same thing as peak Barry Bonds*.
*In a good way.
On Wednesday night at Wrigley Field, the New York Mets clinched a sweep and punched their ticket to the World Series by whipping the Chicago Cubs, 8-3, in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series. The Mets got contributions from all over, including five RBI from the previously slumping Lucas Duda.
The other big star of the show, meanwhile, was the definitely-not-previously-slumping Mr. Murphy. He went 4-for-5 with a double and this home run:
Now, here's the thing: Of course Murphy hit a home run. He hit a home run because, well, of course he did.
It's all the 30-year-old second baseman has been doing recently. That was his seventh home run of the postseason, and his sixth in as many games. As MLB let everyone know, that's a new postseason record:
And so, Murphy finished the NLCS with a .529 average, four home runs and six RBI. He was naturally named the NLCS MVP, because that's the thing to do when a guy puts up numbers like that.
And really, things don't look worse if you extend the sample size.
In nine postseason games, Murphy has come to the plate 39 times and hit .421 with a 1.462 OPS. More to the point, nothing stands out quite like his seven home runs and eye-poppingly huge 1.026 slugging percentage. If these numbers go any higher, he'll be giving the view counter on the latest trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens a run for its money.
Obviously, you want to know how these power numbers compare to some of the other great postseason power hitters. How many other guys can claim to have hit for that much power in a single postseason?
As you can imagine, that particular inner circle has few members. And as you can also imagine, Murphy is by far the most unlikely member of the group.
It says a lot that Murphy's seven home runs put him just one shy of the all-time record for a single postseason. Even if, for some reason, he doesn't play in a single World Series game, he'll have already secured a prominent place in that particular column of the record book.
Only six other guys have hit as many as seven home runs in a single postseason. With Murphy included, here's the full list:
If we can be both honest and totally appreciative at once, we can grant that Murphy just doesn't fit here. Of all the players on this list, he's one of only two who didn't warm up for his postseason home run binge by knocking at least 29 dingers in the regular season.
The other was Melvin Upton, who hit only nine in the regular season in 2008. But he at least had something of a track record as a power producer, hitting 24 home runs the prior year in 2007.
Murphy? Not as much. He hit only 14 home runs this season, and those were a career high. He's spent his career more as a contact-oriented line-drive hitter. That makes his place among those six guys all the more mind-boggling.
And then you notice that his 1.026 slugging percentage is not only miles above his career rate of .424, but also the highest on the list. Not even Carlos Beltran in 2004 or Bonds in 2002 climbed that high.
In fact, very few have. Quite a few players have compiled a slugging percentage over 1.000 in a single postseason, but, best I can tell, the only player to do so over at least 30 plate appearances was Manny Ramirez in 2008. And that, as you'll recall, was the year he slugged .743 in 53 games for the Los Angeles Dodgers on his way to getting busted for PEDs in early 2009.
Which, granted, is kind of an ominous thing to note in the middle of a discussion about a totally-out-of-left-field power surge. But don't worry. By all accounts, there's a reasonable explanation for what Murphy is doing.
We noted that Murphy has spent much of his career as a contact-oriented line-drive hitter, but we also noted that he knocked a career-high 14 balls out of the park in 2015. Likewise, his .449 slugging percentage was also a career high.
As for where this comes from, it looks like a small change at the beginning of the year turned into a big one.
As MLB.com's Anthony DiComo noted back in April—and MLB.com's Mike Petriello more recently—Mets hitting coach Kevin Long had Murphy move closer to the plate as part of an effort to combat an early-season slump. As Petriello pointed out, the move seemed custom-designed to improve the .158 average Murphy had against balls on the outer third of the zone.
It ended up doing more than that. Per Baseball Savant, Murphy has hit .333 on balls on the outer third ever since May 1. And as Mike Axisa of CBS Sports noted, Murphy was also able to extend his power stroke beyond just the inner half of the strike zone. A map of his postseason home runs shows that's continuing to pay off, as two of them have come beyond the inner half of the zone.
That's the technical explanation for what's gotten into Murphy, anyway. For a non-technical explanation, we turn to Long, per the New York Post's Joel Sherman:
Not just "from" a different planet. Literally on another planet. And apparently, we all joined along for the ride.
That would explain why things have gotten so weird. And why baseball's postseason history book now looks so improbably different.
Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.
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