Three Teams, Nine Players, One Surprising Winner: Examining the Sean Murphy Blockbuster

The Oakland Athletics are in search of a new ballpark, either within Oakland or elsewhere — most likely Las Vegas. If and when that comes to pass, the aging Coliseum will probably be torn down. And here’s where the A’s lose me: They seem to be under the impression that their active players must all be evacuated in the form of being traded to other organizations before the ballpark is destroyed.

The Atlanta Braves were in no hurry to disabuse Oakland of this notion, as they pried catcher Sean Murphy from Oakland’s clutches Monday afternoon as part of a three-team deal with the Milwaukee Brewers. Four weeks ago I wrote about the trade market for Murphy, made expendable in Oakland by the emergence of Shea Langeliers, who came over from the Braves in the Matt Olson trade. Therein, I specifically noted the Braves as a team that should not trade for Murphy, owing to Atlanta’s surfeit of catchers: Travis d’Arnaud and William Contreras.

Sure enough, with Murphy coming in, not one but two catchers are heading out. Contreras is headed north, while third-stringer — and longtime Brewers backup — Manny Piña will go to Oakland. Speedster Esteury Ruiz is also headed down the John Jaha Highway from Milwaukee to Oakland, and no fewer than five pitchers fill out this salad bar of a trade: Freddy Tarnok, Kyle Muller and Royber Salinas from Atlanta to Oakland, Joel Payamps from Oakland to Milwaukee, and Justin Yeager from Atlanta to Milwaukee.

Here’s the entire three-team, nine-player deal in table form, for clarity’s sake.

Nine players makes for a big trade, but nevertheless, let’s go through each name in at least some detail before drawing conclusions.

The two biggest names in this trade are Murphy and Contreras. Murphy, a former Wright State legend, has quietly emerged as one of the best two-way catchers in baseball. Quietly, because to this point he played on a small-market West Coast team that just lost 102 games. If casual fans know Murphy at all, it’s from his viral hit-by-pitch earlier this season.

Murphy’s numbers are similarly attention-grabbing. This year, he led all catchers in plate appearances (612) and finished with a 122 wRC+, which was seventh among backstops who batted at least 300 times. There’s no spectacular individual element to Murphy’s offensive game, like Alejandro Kirk’s hit tool or J.T. Realmuto’s basestealing. Murphy just hit .250/.332/.426 with 18 home runs while playing his home games in a pitcher-friendly ballpark.

But while other top offensive catchers, like the Contreras brothers, leave something to be desired defensively, Murphy’s defense is also among the best at his position. In 2022, he was fifth in framing runs, third in overall defensive runs, and also threw out 31% of opposing basestealers. He and Realmuto were the only players to catch 1,000 or more innings this season. Short of Realmuto or Adley Rutschman, Murphy is about the best two-way catcher out there. And since neither Realmuto or Rutschman were available in trade this offseason, he’s the best Atlanta could get.

Why would Oakland want to trade him? Well, in addition to the emergence of Langeliers, Murphy is 28 years old and bound for arbitration for the first time this year. That makes him extraordinarily cheap to a team like Atlanta, which has embarrassingly wealthy ownership and an above-average payroll. Not so to the A’s, who according to RosterResource currently have just one player set to make more than $5 million next season. With three years left of team control for Murphy, the time to deal him for a big haul is now. (Whether the A’s actually accomplished that is open for debate.)

Contreras is also one of the best offensive catchers in baseball in a small sample. He hit .278/.354/.506 in 376 plate appearances in 2022. Offensively, he’s got more power than Murphy but strikes out more. Defensively, he’s not terrible, but at best he’s roughly average. The most optimistic possible reading of Contreras’ brief big league career is that he’s a 24-year-old All-Star catcher who posted a wRC+ of 138 and has five more years of team control. That brings to mind a future at least on par with what his older brother has achieved — stardom, in short. Alternatively, he has fewer plate appearances in his entire major league career than Murphy had this season alone; he’s made only 106 starts behind the plate at the big league level; and he hit just .215/.303/.399 as a rookie. In other words, he’s still young enough that it’s reasonable to expect some risk.

The third catcher in this deal, Piña, has never been a particularly good hitter, but he staked out a respectable six-year career with the Brewers as a catch-and-throw guy, mostly as a backup. Last offseason, Atlanta signed him to a two-year contract worth $4 million a year, but Pina appeared in only five big league games before wrist surgery shut him down for the season in May. (If this trade is how you found out Piña no longer played for the Brewers, welcome.) Piña is an ideal backup for an up-and-coming catcher like Langeliers, and with $4.5 million left on his deal, plus a $4 million player option for 2024, he immediately becomes one of Oakland’s most expensive players.

At this point in their careers, Murphy is a clear upgrade over Contreras, though in 12 months’ time that might no longer be the case. And while catcher was hardly an area of need for Atlanta, particularly with d’Arnaud still on the team, Murphy is by some distance the best and most valuable player in this trade.

What this means for d’Arnaud remains to be seen. The longtime journeyman seemed to have found a home with Atlanta, where over the past three seasons he’s hit .266/.324/.462. He’s still only 33 years old, and has one year plus a club option left on his current deal, each worth $8 million. But d’Arnaud’s bat has been inconsistent throughout his career, and he’s never played a full season; this year, he hit his career high with 426 plate appearances. His walk rate also dipped to 4.5%, a career low. While d’Arnaud was perfect for a time-share with another offense-first catcher like Contreras, he’s probably too good to be a full-time backup for a high-volume catcher like Murphy. A transition to DH, or a trade, is probably in the cards for d’Arnaud as well.

Two-thirds of the players who moved in this trade are, of course, not catchers. I can’t claim expert knowledge of all the prospects in this trade, but luckily, supreme prospect potentate Eric Longenhagen can, and he was kind enough to share his expertise for this article. Anything insightful you see below is paraphrased from his notes:

First among the youngsters is Ruiz, the 23-year-old outfielder Milwaukee recently acquired as part of the Josh Hader deal at this season’s deadline. Ruiz is one of the fastest runners you’ll find on a baseball diamond. He stole — and I went back and double-checked this number, it’s so ridiculous — 85 bases in 114 games across two minor league levels in 2022. He’s also shown power from time to time, and that combination of physical tools makes him enticing to Oakland, a team that’s pursued him since before the Hader trade. But his ability to access said power in games is mostly limited to pulling mistake pitchers, and Eric says the most likely outcome for him is as a reserve outfielder.

Meanwhile, every pitcher who moved in this deal is intriguing in his own way.

Muller is a big, 6-foot-7, 250-pound left-hander, and a former second-round pick. He saw limited action in the majors for the Braves in both 2021 and ’22, but in so doing burned two minor league option years while accruing just 46 days of service time. That makes him an awkward roster fit for Atlanta, which might use him as a no. 6 or no. 7 starter and has championship aspirations, but less so for the A’s, who can just stick him in the majors, give him 25 or 30 starts, and see what he’s got.

And there’s potentially quite a bit there. Muller, says Eric, is not as wild as his 13.1% career major league walk rate would suggest. In Triple-A this year, he threw his fastball in the mid-90s, with a slider and curveball that were both above-average-to-plus, as well as a changeup. If Muller is capable of starting in the majors, Oakland will surely give him an opportunity to prove it. If he ends up in the bullpen, at least A.J. Puk will be able to tell him where a man that size buys clothes in the Bay Area.

The A’s seem to have combed Atlanta’s system for Absolute Units and picked the 21-year-old righty Salinas, whom Eric describes as a “husky guy.” Salinas sits 94-95 with an excellent slider and a seldom-used curveball that gets an elite swing-and-miss rate. In 2022, he made 25 starts across two levels of A-ball and struck out 175 batters in just 109 innings; it’s easy to see why Oakland likes him. The drawbacks: 63 walks in those same 109 innings, and substantial reliever risk because of a lack of athleticism as well as a high walk rate. But his breaking stuff is so good that if he ends up airing out in the ‘pen, he could become a very good reliever.

Tarnok is a lanky 6-foot-3 former two-way player whose major league experience comes to a grand total of three batters faced. He, too, sits in the mid-90s with a changeup with good arm-side movement, as well as a mid-70s curveball he can use as a get-me-over pitch. Eric believes Tarnok is another guy who might thrive if his velocity jumps in the bullpen.

In addition to Contreras, Milwaukee receives two relief pitchers: Payamps and Yeager. Payamps is 28 years old and has made 82 big league appearances for four teams over the past four seasons. Since signing as an amateur free agent out of the Dominican Republic in 2010, he’s changed teams eight times — once after being released, once after being purchased by the Royals from the Blue Jays last year, five times via waivers, and now as part of a trade for the first time. That must be a new and exciting experience for him.

That transaction history should give you an idea of what Payamps brings: He’s an arm. He doesn’t strike anyone out, but he gets groundballs and his fair share of popups. After 113 career big league innings, he has a FIP of 4.19 but an ERA of 3.35. My theory is that he came to be on the A’s by telling the ballpark security staff that he was Yusmeiro Petit, and his deception was only revealed when he started throwing 95 and not 88.

Yeager, 24, is a former 33rd-round pick out of Southern Illinois. He’s skirted around the periphery of true prospectdom, but he can hit 98 with his fastball and backs it up with a hard slider in the high 80s, and both pitches gained velocity in the past year. If he can throw both pitches for strikes, he could be a useful middle reliever.

If you skipped all the prospect stuff in search of the big picture takeaway and hot takes, here you go.

From the Braves’ perspective: If I were Alex Anthopoulos, I’m not sure I would’ve used my trade capital to upgrade a position where Atlanta was already strong. But with that said, there’s a chance Contreras will never be this good again and d’Arnaud is about to decline. And while all four pitchers Atlanta traded are interesting in some way or other, none is the kind of prospect I’d lose sleep over moving. All four are more useful to Oakland or Milwaukee than they would be to the Braves.

And while I usually find “they got the best player in the trade”-type analysis a bit reductive, Atlanta absolutely got the best player in the trade. Murphy is an absolute stud who’s under team control for three more years and will make relative peanuts that whole time. That’s now a description that fits somewhere between five and seven of Atlanta’s starting position players and at least two of Atlanta’s starting pitchers. That’s a good position to be in.

The Braves are the team whose return from this trade I feel most ambivalent about. Oakland…I get what the A’s are doing, and I hate it. If Ruiz grows into his power and turns into a perennial 30-30 guy, the A’s will look like geniuses. Certainly the numbers from the high minors this season are impressive: In Double- and Triple-A combined, he hit .332/.447/.526 with 16 homers, 33 doubles and — again, for those in the back — 85 stolen bases. But if he were likely to hit like that in the majors, he wouldn’t have gotten traded twice in the past five months, once by a team that picked him up for an extremely broken-looking relief pitcher and got a chance to see him in their own system.

And while all three of Oakland’s new pitchers have potential, unless one of them takes a huge leap forward, having all three become pretty good relievers seems like a good outcome. And because they’re all major league-ready and the A’s seem committed to trading anyone who’s arbitration-eligible, that leap had better come soon. What this looks like, then, is trading Murphy’s three years of service time, plus Payamps, for three big league-ready prospects with a combined 77 days’ worth of service time, plus Salinas.

The list of things the A’s have done recently to get slightly worse but slightly cheaper is long, though this trade doesn’t quite fit the meme because Piña is projected to make more than Murphy next year. Anyway, it’s worth asking — and I’m not the only one to have this thought — why they didn’t just take the younger, cheaper catcher with big offensive upside?

Contreras was good enough to catch for the Braves and makes a much more logical partner for Langeliers than Murphy given how much of his value is in his bat. Contreras would’ve been Oakland’s best hitter in 2022 (minimum 50 PA) by 16 points of wRC+ over Murphy and 21 points over top returning hitter Seth Brown. And he’s 24 and under team control through 2027. That feels like an easier sell, particularly if the A’s could’ve persuaded Atlanta to part with, say, Muller as well.

Because now it’s time to come down to Milwaukee’s role in this trade. If you want to know why your life is harder than it should be, you should become familiar with an economic concept called rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is the behavior of middlemen, people or more often companies that insert themselves between the people who produce goods and services and those who consume them, charging additional fees and exploiting regulatory loopholes while providing little or no additional value to the proposition. Examples include: Health insurance companies, Ticketmaster, rideshare and gig economy startups. Think sub-cable company levels of cost-to-usefulness ratio and you’ll be on the right track.

That’s how much the Brewers won this trade.

Milwaukee is one of the few teams that sits in the middle of the Venn diagram of 1) having designs on competing in 2023 and 2) being nearly as hard-up for offense as the A’s. They got a middle-of-the-order bat, at a premium position and under team control from now until the Sun swallows the Earth, plus a live bullpen arm and a hard-throwing Double-A reliever. And all it cost them was a young outfielder they didn’t think they could use. They inserted themselves into a process — Atlanta wants Murphy, Oakland wants rid of Murphy — and came out way ahead while risking little. It feels like it should be against the rules somehow.

As complicated as this trade ended up being, the Braves and A’s both behaved — for good or ill — broadly in line with their reputations. The Brewers, meanwhile, can only hope that all of their trades end up being this fruitful.