Daniel Murphy, ex-Nats slugger, signs minor league deal with Angels

The move was announced by the Long Island Ducks, with whom Murphy signed in March. They added that he was being assigned to the Angels’ Class AAA affiliate in Salt Lake City.

A spokesman for the Angels confirmed the team signed Murphy to a minor league deal but said he had no details on the player’s initial destination within the farm system.

Murphy, who finished second in 2016 National League MVP voting while with the Washington Nationals and was named MVP of the 2015 NLCS as a New York Met, led the Ducks this season in hits, batting average and on-base percentage, the team said. He was also in the top 10 in the Atlantic League in those categories, per the Ducks, and notched a 16-game hitting streak and a 19-game on-base streak.

“Daniel made the most of his time with the Ducks,” Ducks President/General Manager Michael Pfaff said in a statement. “We want to thank him for his hard work with the Flock, congratulate him on this exciting opportunity and wish him the best of luck with the Angels.”

After playing in the majors for 12 years, including stints with the Chicago Cubs and Colorado Rockies to end that run, Murphy felt “beat up pretty good,” he said in April. All the unexpected downtime during MLB’s pandemic-truncated 2020 season also revealed to Murphy, as he said in 2021, that he had been guilty of a “blind spot” regarding all the time he had missed with his family, including his wife and three children.

Watching his kids play baseball and taking note of how they moved so “freely” inspired Murphy to grab a bat again and tinker with his swing.

“I like to call it being a bit more un-weighted,” he told the New York Post last month.

Murphy also told the New York Post that, while back in his hometown of Jacksonville, Fla., he rediscovered his love of the game through watching Ken Burns’s “Baseball” documentary series and listening to audiobooks about the history of the sport.

When Murphy joined the Ducks, he said in a statement that his “passion for playing grew as great as ever when I discovered certain things that I believe will enable me to be productive on the field again.”

It helped that the Ducks are managed by Wally Backman, a former Mets player and manager in their minor league system who worked with Murphy in the past.

“He didn’t need to come here. He made almost $90 million,” Backman said last month of Murphy. “We talked about that, even before he committed to doing this. I said, ‘Murph, why?’ He said, ‘I’m trying a few new things, getting my swing back to the way it once was, but I’ve got to try it on the field, and I’m only going to do it as long as I have fun.’ And you can tell he’s having fun every day.”

A 13th-round pick by the Mets in 2006 out of Jacksonville University, Murphy got his first major league experience two years later and quickly established himself as one of the team’s most consistent hitters, albeit without much power. He earned an all-star selection in 2014, then burst onto the national scene in the 2015 playoffs with a seemingly out-of-nowhere display of long-ball prowess. Murphy, whose 14 home runs that season were at that point a career high, set an MLB record by going deep in six straight postseason games as he helped lead the Mets to the World Series.

When he hit free agency after that season, the Mets and other teams seemed skeptical about Murphy’s midcareer improvement. New York made little effort to bring him back, and the Nationals made a push for his services only after striking out on a couple of other options. The three-year, $37.5 million deal Murphy signed with Washington quickly proved to be money well spent, though, as he had the best seasons of his career in 2016 and 2017 before the underperforming 2018 Nationals dealt him late in the season to the Cubs.

If Murphy can keep up his hitting in the high minors for the Angels, he might be able to help the big league club as a utility man and a bat off the bench.