You have only one chance to make a good first impression, and Daniel Murphy has done just that in his first postseason. The inherent nature of the playoffs -- a mere few weeks and not a 26-week regular season -- ensures that there always will be some non-stars that grab the headlines each year.
There's little question that Murphy is a big reason why the Mets are just two wins away from returning to the World Series for the first time since 2000's disappointing Subway Series loss to the Yankees in five games. In seven games so far this postseason, he has hit five home runs, a number which by itself already ranks his 2015 postseason performance highly in playoff history. The record for homers in a postseason is eight, jointly held by Barry Bonds (2002), Carlos Beltran (2004) and Nelson Cruz (2011), and they needed 17, 12 and 17 games, respectively, to hit those marks. At five homers, Murphy's figure is in a 20-way tie for 20th all time, and of the other 19 players, 18 of them required more plate appearances to get their five dingers. The lone exception is Juan Gonzalez, who hit five homers in four games for the Texas Rangers in their 1996 ALDS loss to the Yankees.
Looking at win probability added -- a measure that takes into account the game situation as well as the raw performance, which is something I find philosophically more interesting in the playoff sprint rather than the regular-season marathon -- Murphy's postseason already ranks among the best in baseball history. To get a more accurate measure and try to avoid a list that's dominated by pinch-hitters who came through in one big moment, I also use the leverage index to calculate what FanGraphs calls Context-Neutral Wins.
In terms of Context Neutral Wins, Murphy already has one of the top 50 postseasons among hitters in modern history (going back to the first official World Series in 1903). Incidentally, Murphy is not alone in already entering the top 50; he's joined by Cubs rookie Kyle Schwarber. Below is the full list, and keep in mind the more games in which to accumulate stats the better, which is why most of the top performances have happened since the Division Series round was added in 1995:
As you can see, Murphy checks in at No. 50 so far. His postseason performance is already enough to make him a Mets folk hero -- a big deal for a team that on a historical level tends to play second fiddle to their neighbors in the Bronx.
Looking at just Mets hitters, Murphy's 2015 playoff season already ranks second in Mets history, behind only Carlos Delgado's 2006 postseason, in which he hit .351/.442/.757 with four homers in 10 games.
Let's talk contract
Murphy's timing is good: He's having his big postseason performance right before he hits free agency. Postseason performance has always been in this weird limbo historically, in that we count playoff performances as more important, yet the actual statistics get roped off into another category and usually aren't considered part of a player's career stats. For instance, Babe Ruth's home run record that Hank Aaron chased was 714, not the 729 he hit overall in his career, counting playoffs. In fact, arguably Ruth's most celebrated home run, his (alleged) called shot in the 1932 World Series, wasn't even one of the "canon" 714 home runs.
The ZiPS projection system, however, does use playoff stats when determining projections simply because including them makes the projections more accurate. Not a ton more accurate -- there are a lot more regular-season games than playoff games, after all -- but they were real performances that should count in how we view a player's ability. This is baseball's Big Dance after all, not March tuneup games against the other team's B squad.
For most players, the impact on the bottom line won't be large. Star ballplayers will be paid like star ballplayers no matter how they play in October. Same goes for the scrubs. But for a player like Murphy, who is firmly entrenched in baseball's middle class, a huge postseason like this can actually have a real effect on his expectation going forward, and thus his salary. And teams do take this performance into consideration; while it won't drastically change a team's perception of a player, ZiPS has projected free-agent salaries as slightly better when playoff stats are included in the model as opposed to looking only at the regular season.
In Murphy's case, his postseason power surge has essentially changed his 2015 regular-season slugging percentage of .449 into a .474 slugging percentage for the season. Given that the most recent season is the most important data in a typical projection, that does, in fact, move the needle on the kind of contract Murphy is projected to receive.
This offseason, Murphy's most interested suitors ought to be teams that are more risk-averse; that is, teams that have a real short-term need for a second baseman and are mostly in win-now mode. Murphy is not a star, even a minor one, and his good-bat, weak-glove combination at second has put him, by Baseball-Reference's reckoning, between 1 and 2 WAR a year in every season of his career except for his standout 2011 (3.0).
Projected salary: Before the playoffs began, ZiPS projected Murphy to receive a 3-year, $29 million contract, putting him in the same general area as Omar Infante's four-year, $30 million contract with the Royals a few years ago (Infante had a little better history than Murphy but was older than Murphy is now, and there have been two years of salary growth since then). With Murphy's 2015 postseason performance added in, Murphy's projection moves closer to the league-average second baseman, improving his salary projection to a 3-year, $36 million contract, a boost of $7 million or just under 25 percent. Not bad for seven games worth of work; that's a million per game!
October is baseball's time for new heroes, players that wouldn't receive much time in the limelight otherwise. A time when a journeyman outfielder such as Billy Hatcher or a role player like Dusty Rhodes (the Giants hitter, not the wrestler) can push the stars out of the headlines for a week or two. For a sport that places such an emphasis on history like baseball, playoff stories turn into fables and give us memories of players that linger more vividly in the decades to come than their stat line. Add Daniel Murphy, Mets second baseman, to the book.