Can Sean Murphy bounce back? There are some promising signs.

The Atlanta Braves have had a slow offseason. There are likely multiple variables in play as to why the offseason has been slow, but one of them is likely that the front office has faith that players that underperformed last season will bounce back.

One of the most obvious bounce back candidates is Sean Murphy. There is no need to sugarcoat it. Sean Murphy had a bad season last year from an offensive standpoint. With a slash line of .193/.284/.352 and a wRC+ of 78 (22.0 percent below league average) in 264 plate appearances, it ranks him thirtieth among catchers with at least 250 plate appearances in total offensive output according to Fangraphs.

Fangraphs uses a combination of hitting and baserunning and gives a score. For reference, with the league average being 0.0, the league leader at catcher had a 22.4. Murphy ended his season with a -7.3. What makes it worse is that the league leader was William Contreras, who was part of the trade package that brought Murphy to Atlanta.

We could debate endlessly on that trade, but the reality is that Murphy needs to bounce back. He is signed through the 2028 season, and the Braves gave up a lot to get him.

Even if we look at his underlying offensive metrics, they were not good. His expected weighted on Base Average (xwOBA) was .308. The league average xwOBA this past season was .312, his strikeout rate of 25.4 percent was much worse than the league average of 22.6 percent, and his expected batting average of .214 is obviously bad when you consider the league average was .243.

With all the negatives from last season, there is some reason for hope.

With all the negatives with his offense, he was still solid on defense. With only playing in seventy-two games, he was in the top 3.0 percent of all catchers in Blocks Above Average. He also was in the best 30.0 percent of catchers in framing.

It is also safe to assume his oblique injury in the very first game of the season lingered and impacted his offensive effort when he came back.

Even though underlying metrics show he performed poorly, it should still be noted that almost every metric that matters shows over an extended period of time that his output would have increased. His wOBA of .281 was lower than his xwOBA of .308, his batting average of .193 was lower than his xBA .214, and his slugging percentage of .352 was lower than his xSLG of .399.

These expectancy stats are never a guarantee of what will happen in the future, but it does paint a picture of his smaller than normal sample size working against him. Murphy was also unlucky in terms of batting average of balls in play (BABIP). Murphy’s career average BABIP, even after this past season, is .271. Last season it was his lowest of his career at .223. Typically, when a player has a BABIP that is much lower than their average, it is an indicator of bad luck.

If we look at Murphy’s career, we can make an educated guess that last season was an anomaly. We can look at his xwOBA by season and see that last season was much different than the rest of his career.

We can also see that 2023 was a much higher output than his career averages too. However, even if we made the argument that 2023 was also an anomaly we can look at the other years of his career and see that his xwOBA was almost perfectly consistent between 2020 and 2022 floating between .439 and .441. From 2020 through 2022 Murphy’s xwOBA was never worse than being in the top 39.0 percent of MLB.

In a nutshell, Murphy does not need to get back to his 2024 form to be an elite catcher. Even if he reverts back to what he was the three seasons prior to 2023, it will go a long way in helping Atlanta getting back on track. In fact, from 2020 through 2022 (which does not include his massive 2023) only one catcher in MLB accumulated more fWAR than Murphy, and that was J.T. Realmuto.

What can Murphy work on to get back on track?

Hopefully having a full offseason to recover is going to go a long way in a bounce back for Sean Murphy. In terms of getting more granular on his issues last season, he struggled against breaking pitches.

Outside of 2019, in which he only saw eighty-eight breaking pitches, 2024 was his lowest xwOBA on breaking pitches. This was largely due to two reasons.

First, his hard hit percentage on breaking pitches was the lowest of his career at 27.9 percent of the time. For reference, since he became a full-time starter, his hard hit percentage on breaking pitches has never been lower than 37.4 percent.

Second, his swing and miss percentage on breaking pitches inside of the strike zone was a career high last season at 24.1 percent of the time. It has never been higher than 21.4 percent and that was back in 2020. Could this be due to his oblique injury? We may never know, but it is possible.

More specifically, Murphy really struggled against the slider this past season. His xwOBA of .190 on the pitch was easily his worst of his career. For reference, in his past three seasons it never dropped below .301.

As the previous results showed when looking at breaking pitches as a group, Murphy struggled at swinging and missing on sliders inside of the strike zone. His 25.4 percent rate was by far his worst. Previously, he had never had one higher than 19.8 percent.

In summary

Sean Murphy had a bad season last season, and there is know debating that. However, he did have a major injury in the very first game that could have very likely hampered him when he came back.

There is a possibility that his injury contributed to his a big weakness last season that he has not had in the past. He struggled at swinging and missing at breaking pitches (especially the slider) that were inside the strike zone at a career high rate.

We also see some indicators of bad luck. He had a career low BABIP, his XSTATS show over a longer period of time that his on field output would increase, and a trend analysis shows that last season could be an anomaly.

All Murphy has to do is revert back to his normal form, even if we exclude his elite 2023 performance and he would be back to being one of the best catchers on the planet.