SB Nation User Blog: sec119

It's Donnie Murphy time! Seriously.

sec119 — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:38:03 -0000

Under the assumptions 1) that Bobby Crosby is hurting the team with his bat and needs to be replaced, and 2) that there are no outstanding SS candidates in the farm system, I think it’s time to give Donnie Murphy a shot at SS.

For the moment, I'll focus on offense and make no claims about his defense, although I'll point out that he was originally drafted as a SS and played 59, 41 and 20 games at SS in 2002, 2003, and 2005 in the minors, resp., with an additional handful of games at SS in the last couple years. But first, a (brief?) retrospective on Murphy’s career, with stats from the baseball cube:

Murphy was drafted by the Kansas City Royals in 2002 at the age of 19, where he played 28 games with A- Spokane and hit .303/.356/.431/.787. He was promoted the same year to level A Burlington, where he underwhelmed with .225/.300/.325/.625. The following year he started in Burlington, where he hit a much better .313/.397/.425/.822. Murphy was promoted to A+ Wilmington in 2004 as a 21-year-old, and produced a line of .256/.328/.404/.732 before he was a September call-up to Kansas City straight from A+. This is similar to us calling up ... 2B Justin Sellers from Stockton, if I’ve understood the ordering of our minor league affiliates correctly. As a point of comparison, Mark Ellis hit .327/.424/.452/.876 as a 22-year-old in Spokane, in 1999, and Ellis hit .302/.404/.411/.815 as a 23-year-old in Wilmington.

Anyway, Murphy started 2005 in AA Wichita, in the Texas League, hitting a decent .313/.362/.523/.885 before an extended July call-up to Kansas City where he failed to impress in 77 AB in 32 games with a line of .156/.241/.260/.501. Low BA, draws walks, sound familiar? And 2006 he spent the entire season in Wichita, where he hit .240/.300/.437/.737. At this point, John Sickels ranks Donnie Murphy as the 19th best prospect in the Royals Organization, with worries about health and a stagnating bat. I’m not sure what the health issues are, but with respect to the stagnating bat I’d argue that his natural development was stunted for half a season to a season by his call-ups too early to KC.

This year he’s quietly put together a batting line of .327/.394/.516/.910 in 41 games and 150 AB in AAA while riding the Oakland/Sacramento yo-yo. Keep in mind he’s only 24 years old. Despite the deflation in statistics that occurs from the hitter friendly PCL to the majors, Crosby’s set a low bar that Murphy should easily surpass, and Murphy looks to improve in the future as well. So my hope is that, after Murphy comes off the BL, he'll get an extended look from Geren and Beane as the SS of the near future.

Poll

Who should play SS for the A's?

toronto moneyballers (on defense?)

sec119 — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 05:20:45 -0000

if almost every line drive we hit looks like it's hit right to a fielder, at least part of it is due to good defense on the part of toronto, and not just bad luck, right? i'm left wondering if we really are getting unlucky, or if toronto's outfield is that great. it's hard to see on tv (or even at the stadium, when you're looking at the batter) how much of a jump an outfielder gets on the ball, for example. given the debate over defensive stats, i'm not sure if there's a good way to answer this even if we had all the information available to us. any thoughts? are we getting hosed? did JP pull a moneyball on defense? or is it too early in the season for me to start thinking about these things...

Crosby has cracked rib

sec119 — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 22:45:34 -0000

http://oakland.athletics.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/news/press_releases/press_release.jsp?ymd=20050406&c ontent_id=1001806&vkey=pr_oak&fext=.jsp&c_id=oak

Note also that Saarloos has been added. Anyway, it's a good thing that we got Ginter after all, since having another infielder around is now necessary. I guess Scutaro will take SS and Ellis 2nd, with Ginter backing up Ellis and Ellis backing up Scutaro?

Caribbean World Series on TV

sec119 — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 04:06:02 -0000

CWS is on FSN right now...the only reason I post it on AN is that I just watched Durazo crush a 2-run homerun for Mexico. So, 1) you can get 1/9th of your A's baseball fix before the season starts, and 2) I wonder why some players do better when they take time off and others do better when they do winter ball. Maybe it doesn't even matter, player perceptions just depend on how they do during the season, when they attribute their performance to whatever they did or didn't do during the offseason?

How long have you been an AN member?

sec119 — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 20:17:59 -0000

I have to admit, I've been reading AN for quite some time but never bothered to sign up. The interview with Billy Beane, though, just put me over the top -- it's a thousand times better than anything else in the Bay Area media, with the exception of Susan Schlusser and Mychael Urban. So now I'm a little curious about the readership here, especially since it seems like a lot more people joined recently as well.