A great number of baseball wags—particularly those who favor the days of cleaner living and an, arguably, cleaner game—have been promoting the Hall of Fame candidacy of former outfielder/first baseman Dale Murphy since his retirement. They have a good argument. Dale Murphy has far better career statistics than other perennial losers in the Hall of Fame race—better overall numbers than Dave Kingman, more consistent numbers than Joe Carter and Jim Edmonds, and a more well-rounded game than Jack Clark.
To be sure, Dale Murphy racked up some strong numbers in the sexy categories. Those that gain favor from Hall voters. His eighteen-year career allowed him to accumulate a solid power base—398 HRs and 1,266 RBIs—but his .265 career batting average, while much higher than Kingman’s, does little to impress the Hall voters. Some would say his back-to-back National League MVPs (1982 and 1983), seven All-Star appearances (1980, 1982-1986), six Gold Gloves (1982-1986), and four Silver Slugger awards (1982-1986) should cement his status as one of the greatest players of his era.
Maybe it is not Murphy’s fault he played his best years in the pre-juiced ball part of the eighties, and had his best stats against relatively weak offensive numbers of colleagues. Maybe he was just a very good player who followed the age-graded predictors of success, having his best seasons during his peak athletic years. From ages 26-30 (1982-1986) Murphy won both of his MVPs, hit 174 of those 398 career HRs, racked up 504 of his 1,266 career RBIs. That he also had his only two .300-plus seasons during that time does not help his candidacy.
One more rub: the only time Dale Murphy hit more than 40 homers was during the juiced-ball year, when he tagged 44, batting .295, with 105 RBIs and earning the final All-Star nod of his career. Sustained high-performance or, in recent years, career longevity that leads to certain all-but-Hall-lock plateaus (see: Biggio, Craig) is what paves the road to the Hall. Murphy played eight more seasons after the juiced-ball season and never again hit more than 24 HRs, nor did he exceed 84 RBIs. Perhaps most damning: he never again hit higher than .266, which he achieved in part of a season with the Phillies in 1990.
To be fair, Murphy battled numerous injuries during the last five years of his career, missing almost all of 1992 and 1993. He will likely remain one of only two multiple-MVP winners (Roger Maris is the other) to not make the Hall of Fame.
It is not Murphy’s Hall eligibility under investigation today. Let’s look at just one year, and present the amazing facts of Dale Murphy’s eerie and near-supernatural 1983 season.
Dale Murphy wore uniform number 3 throughout his career. In 1983, the occurrence of numbers related to the number three, especially as multiples of three in Murphy’s life and career to that point, met a strange confluence. Maybe this was preordained at birth—he was, after all, born on the twelfth day of the third month in the year 1956, and he was drafted by the Atlanta Braves in 1974. Then, the nearly ridiculous cohesion of the mystical “troika” and Dale Murphy occurred in the magical season of 1983.
Dale Murphy had played with the Braves major league club since 1976 by the time the 1983 season began, though this would prove to be his 6th full season, and he entered the season at the ripe young age of 27. That year the Braves would finish with an 88-74 record and manage only a second place finish in the former NL East, but Murphy would rack up stats reeking of threes, perhaps because he was able to play in all 162 games for only the second time in his career.
Murphy logged 687 plate appearances and stroked out 178 hits and, though his at-bat total was a meager 589, and his batting average a clunky-looking .302, he must have taken some comfort in the fact that his average helped him earn the NL MVP, in the third time he had received top three votes for the award, as he finished 6th in the NL in BA.
Murphy earned that MVP, being a monster at the dish that season, or so it would appear. Some would say his meager 24 doubles and 150 singles were hardly indicative of extra-base power, even if he did jack 36 homers and rack up 318 total bases.
Many would point to his lack of speed, though he did streak to 30 stolen bases in 1983. His 90 walks were both an indication of the respect he commanded from pitchers (12 intentional walks) and his discerning eye at the plate (78 earned walks.)
That many times on base surely must have meant good things for Murphy’s on-base percentage (.393) and it most assuredly did. His .540 slugging percentage hardly measures up to today’s puffy power standards, but his .933 OPS was a big number in the early eighties; both numbers enough to lead the league in the two categories.
A man to take one for the team, Murphy smacked 6 sacrifice flies and played a large number of innings (1,386 1/3) to lead his team in that category as well. It was clear that Murphy played well enough to earn his third All-Star appearance that season. Of course, not all powers of three were quite so magical for Murphy that year, as he also grounded into 15 double plays.
When Dale Murphy’s numbers are run through Bill James’ more modern player value calculator, he emerges as the league-leader that year in wins-above-the-value-of-a-replacement-player, or WAR (7.2.) But he was no slouch in the field either. Though Murphy played three different positions for three teams over his eighteen year career, he patrolled only the three outfield positions in 1983, making a mere six errors.
Of course all of these numbers look all the more magical because I have intentionally left out some of the major statistical categories in which Murphy did not do something by a multiple of three, such as runs scored, runs batted in and, ironically, triples. Yes, it was sad but true that Dale Murphy stats in those three major categories were unrelated to the number three in 1983. But, perhaps to atone for what amounted to a minor mathematical failure that season, he concluded his career with totals in each of those categories a bit more favorable, with 1,997 runs scored, 1,266 RBIS, and 39 triples.
Never again did Dale Murphy capture the magic of that 1983 season, nor was he able to conjure the mystical power of three he summoned from some supernatural port that year.
In the end, he played fifteen seasons with the Braves, before moving on to play three seasons with the Phillies (hitting a meager 27 HRs, and scoring only 97 runs, while scraping together 204 hits, for a paltry .249 BA combined in the three seasons.)
Murphy wrapped up his career with start-up Colorado. In that sad, last-gasp, Dale Murphy, now so-injury-riddled he would play only 26 games, managed to make only 42 ABs, eking out just 6 hits and, perhaps most telling, struck out 15 times.
Though Murphy would accumulate a veritable mountain of three-related stats in 1983, the season was hardly magical for the Braves. Though they were a six-letter team, in name, the squad would not make it to the playoffs. Perhaps they were overmatched by the team from a twelve-letter city—Philadelphia—who had won 90 games and lost just 72. Fittingly, the Braves, with their 88-74 record (a .584 winning percentage) finished three games out of the race for the pennant. Of course, the dominance of higher–number multiples of three did not favor the Phillies in the World Series that year as they stumbled to a 4 games to 1 defeat at the hands of the team from a nine-letter city: Baltimore.
In hindsight, we cannot be completely surprised by this outcome…after all, what Dale Bryan Murphy (15 letters) had set in motion with his crazy 1983 season and the unveiling of the power of three, was capped off by a man on that 1983 Orioles team who just happened to be that year’s American League MVP: none other than a player with three letters in his first name and six letters in his last: starting Shortstop and would-be Ironman—Cal Ripken.