Today’s daily question isn’t a real question — it’s rhetorical.
I recently taught my six-year-old how to operate the lock on her door, so that she could keep her room inviolable from the predations of her 19-month-old sister. It took her literally four days until she woke up in the middle of the night and locked her room before morning, so that I could not wake her up to get ready for school. When I knocked and yelled, make no mistake: she was awake. She was just pretending not to hear. When I picked the lock and came in a few minutes later, she was remorseless: “You guys always wake me up, I just want to sleep in. I wish every day was the weekend!” I didn’t ask her, rhetorically, “What were you thinking?” but I could have.
I am also not going to ask Sean Murphy that, rhetorically or not. But you get the idea. Reading some of the quotes from the Mark Bowman article is just top-tier woofage:
“It’s been bothering him the last three years,” Anthopoulos said. “He said he would just grind through it and play through it and it would come and go. But in talking to Dr. Burke today, he was stunned he’d been playing the last three years with a significant tear.”
…
“He’d been getting some treatment on his hip, swore to us he was fine,” Anthopoulos said. “Ultimately, we had a conversation with him last night and he said, ‘Look, it has been bothering me. I can get through the season. I was going to come to you guys at the end of the year and ask you for an MRI.’”
…
“He never made excuses, but there were days where he said, ‘I wouldn’t know if I could go, but I was going to fight through it,’” Anthopoulos said. “But, it got to the point that I just couldn’t do it anymore. Even Dr. Byrd acknowledged this was only going to get worse. He’s tried to manage this the last three years. He should be a much better player once this is resolved.”— Mark Bowman, https://www.mlb.com/braves/news/sean-murphy-right-hip-surgery-miss-rest-of-2025-regular-season
Look, it’s not entirely Sean Murphy’s fault. The Braves have a culture that doesn’t just tolerate this, but encourages it. It’s not just the current coaching staff and regime, either — remember the Chipper Jones / John Smoltz flare-ups in the dugout about Jones playing (or not playing) through injury? There’s a reason that most of the players in the dugout talk about the importance of showing up and grinding as much as they talk about anything else, and why the Braves’ roster construction has grown increasingly hostile to platoons and positional flexibility over the last few years.
There are other places to discuss exactly how damaging this is to the Braves, and why there’s a decent chance it’ll need to change for the Braves to bounce back next year. But, right now, I’m just going to flabber my gast at Sean Murphy basically doing an end run around the coaching, training, and Front Office staffs to keep playing, when the Braves honestly didn’t need him to. The Braves have had a catcher tandem going back forever specifically so that when the tools of ignorance aren’t enough to safeguard a backstop from wear-and-tear, they can afford to take a break, dump a heavier load on their catching partner, and rest up. Sean Murphy reportedly going to the Front Office this offseason and talking about how he wants to be more of a primary catcher, while apparently having a torn labrum in his hip… what were you thinking, Sean Murphy? (I lied, I asked it. I know the answer, though. Club 162 4 Lyfe.)
Part of the irritating thing is that apparently the damage from this sort of injury was intermittent enough that it affected Murphy sometimes, but not other times.
Murphy’s best months inputs-wise as a brave involved much of 2023, but Also July 2024 and April 2025. Murphy’s worst months inputs-wise were August-September 2024 and then June and August 2025; meanwhile, his July 2025 was just fine. There’s a lot of other nonsense in his swing tracking metrics, too, but I think the above, even in non-line chart format, paints a decent picture.