Hot stove season has finally started to pick up for the Atlanta Braves as they made a three-team trade involving nine players where the team acquired A’s catcher Sean Murphy. Dukes & Bell talked about the trade and why it makes sense for the Braves.
Dukes talked about why rules changes may have gone into the thought process of this trade.
“If you go back before the winter meetings our three catchers were Travis d’Arnaud, William Contreras, and Manny Pina. Today we trade two of those guys away to two separate teams. d’Arnaud is still here and we get a new guy that’s gonna step in at catcher in Sean Murphy,” Dukes said. “You look at the average and say this guy doesn’t do anything. Guys, this is about getting better defensively behind the plate where rules are about to change and Major League Baseball anticipates, now we will see how it works, but there’s gonna be more activity on the base paths. You’re gonna have teams taking more chances to steal bases, the bases are going to be a little bigger, how all this plays out. We’ll see, but the shift is going away and you need to be better defensively, I think that plays into this.”
Bell said he thinks Murphy is a better offensive player than many think.
“Our Grant McAuley’s got some numbers if you want to look at defensive information and compare and contrst," said Bell. "Murphy caught 116 games last year, second most in the show behind Realmuto’s 132. He also hit as a DH 30 games for the A’s. in those 116 he caught he batted .269 with 16 homers and an .805 OPS, so that’s pretty impressive. He throws guys out, I think he was second most as far as throwing 19 runners out last year. He is an upgrade.”
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