What if Dale Murphy had not been traded in 1990?
On August 3, 1990, the Atlanta Braves traded Dale Murphy to the Philadelphia Phillies for Jeff Parrett, Jim Vatcher and Victor Rosario.
Do not look on baseball-reference.com for what those three did with the Braves. It will make you depressed beyond what you’re going through now missing baseball.
Murphy had two years left on his contract when he was traded. He had approached then-general manager Bobby Cox earlier that year and suggested it might be better for all involved if he were traded from the only team he had ever played for.
The Braves were in another disappointing season. Cox had signed Nick Esasky and traded for Jim Presley to help Murphy in the lineup. But Esasky played in only nine games and then got vertigo. He never played again. Presley led the National League with 25 errors as a third baseman. Presley could hit, but his defense was awful.
Young players were becoming the story for the team, as David Justice was emerging as a young star. Ron Gant turned things around from his rocky beginning and became a 30/30 man. And the young pitching was showing many positive signs.
But what if Murphy had not decided the time was right to leave? What if he had wanted to stay in Atlanta for at least one more year? What if Cox had also wanted to keep Murphy for a veteran presence around the young players?
Cox relinquished his GM role after the 1990 season and John Schuerholz took over. Schuerholz might not have wanted to inherit a veteran player like Murphy, who had hit .228 since the start of the 1988 season and was clearly not the same player he was in 1987 when he hit .295 and hit 44 home runs.
Let us just say for a moment Murphy had not been traded and Schuerholz decided to keep him. After Murphy was dealt, Justice moved from first base to right field and won the National League Rookie of the Year award. Justice would have either stayed at first base or moved to right field, and the Braves could have then switched Murphy to left field.
Or could Murphy have been helped by going back to first base? He turned 35 in March 1991, so perhaps a move from the outfield back to the position he had played early in his career would have helped him.
Schuerholz obviously put an emphasis on defense when he became the GM, so he might not have wanted Murphy at first base since he had not played there in nine years. Justice made 10 errors in 69 games at first base in 1990, so Schuerholz might not have approved of him there either.
Sid Bream could still have been signed to play first base, with Justice going to right and Murphy switching over to left field. Gant got most of the starts in center field anyway that season, so this would have meant Otis Nixon likely would not have been acquired and that Lonnie Smith would have been reduced to a fourth outfielder role.
Here is what the defensive alignment would have been like:
1B: Sid Bream
2B: Jeff Treadway
SS: Rafael Belliard
3B: Terry Pendleton
LF: Dale Murphy
CF: Ron Gant
RF: David Justice
C: Greg Olson
Before we look at the batting order, one thing stands out. In the real 1991 season, the Braves had Otis Nixon lead off in 93 games, Lonnie Smith lead off in 36 games and then Deion Sanders lead off in 15 games. That’s 144 of the 162 games that were led off by players who in this scenario would not have either been on the team or would not have been everyday players.
Gant led off nine times, so he might have gotten the chance in our scenario to lead off.
Ron Gant – CF
Jeff Treadway – 2B
Terry Pendleton – 3B
David Justice – RF
Sid Bream – 1B
Dale Murphy – LF
Greg Olson – C
Rafael Belliard – SS
How good would that lineup have been?
Jeff Blauser got significant playing time at shortstop (51 starts), second base (26 starts) and even third base (11 starts) in 1991, so he would have made the lineup a little bit better with Belliard not being a good offensive player.
What would Murphy have done if the pressure had not been on him to be the man in the lineup? He would have, in this scenario, been more of a complimentary player compared to the years when he was the only significant player in the batting order. Could less pressure have helped Murphy be more productive than he had been from the start of the 1988 season until when he was traded?
With the Phillies in 1991, Murphy hit .252 with 18 home runs and 81 runs batted in. Could he have done even better in a stronger Atlanta lineup, especially if he had hit lower in the order?
Could Murphy have helped the Braves do the same thing they wound up doing, by coming within one run of winning the World Series? Hopefully, if Murphy, instead of Lonnie Smith, had been at first base in the eighth inning of game seven of the World Series in Minnesota, he would not have been faked out by Chuck Knoblauch and could have scored on Pendleton’s double.
Sorry. I had to go there.
It was terribly sad that after being on all the bad Atlanta teams, Murphy had to watch the Braves get really good right after he was traded. He has admitted to me before that it was understandably difficult watching the team he had played for make the playoffs and he could only watch from afar.
Murphy also has said he believes the trade did help the organization turn the page on his era of Braves baseball and move on to what became a significantly better decade. While everyone still loved Murphy, maybe they did simply need to turn that page. Maybe in a weird, almost cruel way, Murphy needed to go for the changes to be complete.
But isn’t it interesting to wonder if the Braves had not traded Murphy, how he would have been on that much-improved team in 1991? Maybe Pendleton and Bream would not have assumed the roles as the team veterans if they had been on a team that, before they had signed, was pretty much Murphy’s team.
It would have been nice for Murphy to have experienced the winning season in 1991 and to play in such great postseason series as the Braves played in that October. It is one of the “what ifs” that we can ask in the history of Braves Baseball that makes us think what might have been.
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