Last night, I was feeling a little masochistic and I decided that a self imposed torture of listening to WFAN after the game would do the trick. It did.
I did manage however to hear an interesting call about Dan Murphy that managed to find a way to sneak in between all the “Jerry Manuel sucks” calls, and the “this team has no grit” calls.
The caller argued that the fascination with Dan Murphy is growing old, and that the last thing the Mets need right now is a slumping rightfielder in Church, and a glorified singles hitter in Murphy.
He was told that Murphy had as many homeruns as Wright with three, but the caller fired right back and said that those homers would have been outs anywhere else but in Philadelphia where he hit two, and Cincinnati where he hit his other.
I certainly couldn’t argue that point as all three of those Murphy homeruns barely cleared the fence in those bandboxes.
I fell asleep, but when I awoke I wanted to take a closer look at Murphy and see if that caller had a legitimate argument.
The first thing I noticed is that Murphy’s batting average in May was just .200 and that was over a period of nine games and 30 at-bats.
His batting average has fallen below .325 in mid April to .286. In 98 at-bats this season, he has 28 hits, but only 8 of them are extra base hits versus 20 singles.
He is in fact a singles hitter. He also continues to be a liability in left field and despite improving his glove work and footing, he still makes too many mental errors and one of them proved costly in last night’s loss.
I looked at his OBP of .790 and found that only a couple of leftfielders in the NL were worse, and last night’s heart-breaker Matt Diaz was one of them. <insert shriek here>
With Ryan Church continuing to slide into oblivion, don’t expect much improvement as long as he’s taken up permanent residency in Jerry Manuel’s doghouse.
The Mets can afford one corner outfield spot to skimp on the slugging, but two would be playing Russian Roulette with five bullets in the revolver. There’s a chance they can get by, but the odds are it will end up biting us on the ass.
Unfortunately, I don’t offer any solutions with this post. I only wanted to shed light on what could become a big problem down the line, especially if Murphy don’t start swing the bat like he did in May when he hit all those singles.
