Considering Tom Murphy

Do you think I'm cool enough to just call him "Murph?" You're right, probably not.

I am going to do my best going forward to not dwell on the past too much. The days of winning World Series are long behind us, and the days of DFAing a guy three days after claiming him in order to pick up a different guy who you will DFA in six days are equally gone. It’s too early to say what days we’re in now, of course, but we can look back one more time to find the legacy that Farhan Zaidi’s front office left behind.

No, I don’t mean the many player development successes we could point to on the roster. Not Patrick Bailey, or Camilo Doval, or Ryan Walker, or Mike Yastrzemski, Heliot Ramos, or Tyler Fitzgerald. Instead, I want to talk about a player who, while possibly less iconic than any of them, is more emblematic of both the pros and cons of the Zaidi approach. I want to talk about a player who, in a lot of ways, represents both how that approach could have worked and how it failed. And I want to talk about a player who, through no fault of his own, cost the Giants a different guy, who they could really have used both last year and this year.

That player, of course, is Tom Murphy.

Back in 2019, Farhan Zaidi had one driving principle above all others — get more talent into the Giants organization. His job was to…

Oh, there’s a question from a more casual fan. “Who is Tom Murphy?” Right, sorry, he’s a backup catcher. No, no, I don’t begrudge you that at all. No need to apologize. There are no stupid questions. Well, actually there certainly are stupid questions, but that wasn’t one of them. You’re okay.

So, back in 2019, Farhan’s job was to get better players because the Giants didn’t have enough good players. He threw everything at the wall he could: trades, pushing players through the minors unusually fast, minor league free agents, the Rule 5 draft (shout out to Travis Bergen!), waiver claims…you name it, he did it. And while nobody looks at 2019 as a golden age of Giants baseball, it did work. The team got more talented. They went from winning 73 games in 2018 to winning 77 in 2019, and they picked up Mike Yastrzemski as a foundational roster piece along the way. They found Donovan Solano. They developed Logan Webb. A lot of good things came out of that year.

Some of the moves the Giants made came very late in Spring Training that year. They traded for Connor Joe and Michael Reed, and while it famously didn’t go well for them as Giants, they were both Opening Day starters. In late March, Farhan also claimed a catcher off waivers from the Rockies. This catcher had had a promising 2015 and 2016, in the minors and in cups of coffee in the majors, but hadn’t done well the next couple of years, and so he got DFA’d. The Giants picked him up because, hey, free catcher. Then they realized they didn’t have room for him on the roster and shipped him off to Seattle, where he had a great season, hitting his way to a 128 OPS+ and a 2.6 bWAR season in just 281 plate appearances. He was a revelation, but for the Mariners, not the Giants.

Oh, another casual fan with a question. “Was that catcher Tom Murphy?” Ah, you know what, yeah, I should have mentioned that. That’s on me. Great question. It was Tom Murphy. Thanks for paying attention.

Meanwhile, for the first month and a half of 2019, the Giants gave their backup catcher spot to Erik Kratz, whose .503 OPS was not impressive, before trading him to Tampa Bay when Stephen Vogt was healthy again. With Buster Posey somewhat firmly established as the starting catcher, there wasn’t room for Kratz, any more than there would have been room for Murphy.

And yet, picking up Murphy in early 2019 was the right evaluation, even if the Giants just ended up trading him four days later. He was a good, major league-quality player, and the team would have been better if they’d had him instead of Kratz. And then, if they’d managed to keep Murphy around for the whole season somehow, they could have used him in 2020 as a Posey replacement instead of rushing Joey Bart up to the majors to catch alongside Chadwick Tromp.

Yet another question! It’s great you guys are so engaged. “Wasn’t Tom Murphy hurt in 2020?” Wow, you’re not a casual fan at all, are you? You really know your stuff! Kudos to you. Anyway, yes, Murphy did miss the whole shortened 2020 season, but there’s no guarantee that would have happened if he’d been playing in San Francisco. There’s no guarantee of anything!

Fast forward a few years. Murphy gets injured, comes back, and is a nice player for the Mariners over 2022-2023, though not as durable or productive as he was back in 2019. The Giants, seeing an opportunity to pick up a capable major league backup for Patrick Bailey, jump on the chance. It’s a full circle moment! He should’ve been a Giant for years, and now he is. Happy ending!

Except he’s terrible. Murphy only takes 38 plate appearances as a Giant, hits .118 in them, and it turns out he was injured. But a bad, injured player wouldn’t merit a whole newsletter almost a year later; the worst effect of the Murphy signing is that it cause the Giants to trade Joey Bart to the Pirates, where Bart ended up having a great year, with a 120 OPS+ over 282 plate appearances. The Giants, meanwhile, ended up going with Curt Casali as their main backup catcher, with Blake Sabol, Jakson Reetz, and Andrew Knapp all also backing up Bailey for short stints.

The 2024 Giants absolutely could have used Bart behind the dish, and the 2025 version would appreciate him too. But that was never going to happen, because they signed Tom Murphy. Murphy didn’t do anything wrong here, but he does represent the failures of Zaidi’s regime. They were right to pick him up, wrong to trade him, and then wrong a few years later to sign him. They originally made the right call on that player, then made the wrong decision about him, and then, a few years later, made a different decision, which was also wrong.

In other words, the Giants got from the right input to the wrong input, and never figured out why. This also didn’t ever convince them to do more than pick a guy up and DFA him in order to maybe stash him in Sacramento, a strategy that only worked on players who weren’t good enough for any other team to notice.

There was something there. There was something smart, clever, and sophisticated, but other than 2021, Farhan just couldn’t get it to work. Because of that, the Giants lost out on a good catcher, and then, a few years later, they lost out on another one. It’s the same reason the Giants also lost out on Connor Joe’s nice career since 2021, and a good few years of relief from Hunter Harvey. The idea of finding all these players and taking a look at them did work, but when they looked, the Giants just didn’t know what they were seeing.

Tom Murphy, who is again hurt this spring and likely to be out for a while, is probably the most glaring sign of this. The Giants had so many opportunities to be right about him, and managed to miss them all. Because of that, they lost out on Joey Bart, who may or may not impress anyone down the line, but he sure was good last year.

I’d say “Let that be a lesson to someone” except the guy who most needs to learn that lesson works for the Dodgers now, so I hope he never learns a thing.