Written by Ben Reiter at SI.com
Last fall’s World Series was a nightmare for Daniel Murphy. In the Mets’ five-game loss to the Royals, Murphy hit .150 with just three singles in 20 at-bats. Compounding matters, he made two errors at second base, including an eighth-inning muff that sparked Kansas City’s comeback in Game 4. Murphy’s struggles provided grist for skeptics who had said that his magical first two playoff series—during which the 30-year-old career contact hitter had batted .421 and blasted homers in six straight games, including several off some of the game’s best pitchers—represented an unsustainable fluke, born of a notably small sample size.
Now, as the calendar flips to June, Murphy has completed his first two months with the Nationals—who signed him as a free agent in January—batting .397, some 46 points ahead of his closest competitor. He already has nine homers, putting him on pace to double his previous season high of 14. It has started to seem as if, for the new and improved Murphy, it was the World Series that represented the outlying small sample size.
Let’s get it out of the way: it is unlikely that Daniel Murphy will ultimately become the first player in three quarters of a century, since Ted Williams in 1941, to hit .400. Among other things, his batting average on balls in play, .414, would be the highest since Rogers Hornsby’s .422 in 1924, and is almost certain to regress. During his .406 season, Williams’s BABIP was .378.
But Murphy had started looking like one of the better hitters alive before the first two rounds of last October’s playoffs, even if few noticed due to the attention-grabbing heroics of his new teammate, Yoenis Cespedes. Over his final 50 regular-season games, starting last Aug. 1, he batted .296 with eight homers, 37 RBIs and a .533 slugging percentage. Add that stretch to the postseason and his first two months in Washington, and over the past 116 games, Murphy is hitting .345 with 25 homers, 83 RBIs and an OPS better than .975. Five games is a small sample size; 116 might be a new reality.
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