Article: Remember Some Cubs: Matt Murton, The Ginger Samurai

[matto1233]

Look, we're all rooting for Pete Crow-Armstrong or Owen Caissie to be the best redheaded outfielder of the 21st century for the Cubs. Let's just get clear on the fact that they do have a standard to meet.

With so much buzz around Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto this offseason, the continued globalization of baseball has been obvious. Ohtani and Yamamoto, who came to MLB via Japan’s professional baseball league, Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), are joined in free agency by Shōta Imanaga, who is also hoping to become an MLB star.

Most probably remember Matt Murton for his sensational MLB debut season in 2005, or for his fiery red hair. What many may not know, or have forgotten, is that after his MLB career fizzled in 2009, Murton made the jump to NPB and became a star in Japan. 

Matthew Henry Murton was born on October 3, 1981, and was drafted into Major League Baseball by the Boston Red Sox in the supplemental portion of the first round of the 2003 draft. After steady production in his first year or so in the minor leagues, the outfielder was traded to the Cubs in the 2004 deal that is, perhaps, more famously known as the Nomar Garciaparra trade.

What is funny in retrospect about the Garciaparra trade is that Murton actually produced more than double the WAR that Garciaparra did for the Cubs, according to both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference. [Ed. note: I'm glad you can laugh about this. "Funny" is not the word this 1989 baby would use for that turn of events.] Murton got the call to the big leagues in July 2005, after hitting for a .343 average across the two highest levels of the minors to that point in the season.

He continued hitting for a high average with the Cubs, as he went on to hit .441 that July, and he finished the year with a .321/.386/.531 slash line. His emergence earned him the everyday job in left field for the 2006 season. He continued his steady performance, to the tune of a .297/.365/.444 slash line, and his 2.8 WAR was actually good for third among the position players for what was an otherwise dismal Cubs team, according to FanGraphs. 

With the additions of Cliff Floyd and Alfonso Soriano heading into the 2007 season, Murton was relegated to part-time duty, and was sent down to Triple A after not producing much for the first few months.. However, upon his recall in July, he hit .310/.375/.543 to close out the year, and proved to be a valuable platoon partner with the left-handed hitting Floyd in right field for a division-winning team. In a crucial late-season game against the Brewers, he hit a huge home run.

Alas, that was about it for Murton in a Cubs uniform. With Kosuke Fukudome heading to the Cubs the following season, and the completely random emergence of Reed Johnson and Jim Edmonds, Murton didn’t see the field much in 2008, and was a throw-in to a July trade with the Oakland Athletics for Rich Harden.

Murton only got 31 plate appearances the rest of that year for the Athletics, and made his way to the Colorado Rockies for the 2009 season, where he again saw very little playing time. This led him to the Hanshin Tigers of NPB, where he became a legend.

Not only was Murton one of the best players in NPB during his first season over there in 2010, he broke the single-season hits record, previously held by Ichiro. He finished his first season there with 214 hits and a .349 batting average. Shogo Akiyama has since broken this record, with 216 hits in the 2015 season.

The outfielder enjoyed five more fruitful seasons in Japan after 2010, before attempting an unsuccessful MLB comeback with the Cubs in 2016, and then the Tigers in 2017. After that, Murton called it quits for good.

Murton was a high-contact player in his time in MLB, as he struck out in just 14.1 percent of his plate appearances for his career. That can be a valuable player, but Murton didn’t add a ton of power, and for someone who was relegated to a corner outfield spot, power hitting is a must. Thus, he struggled to make a major impact in MLB. But through perseverance and a willingness to give it a go somewhere else, Murton was still able to make an impact on baseball somewhere else in the world. That is a great and noteworthy accomplishment. [Ed. note: As was that homer in 2007. I was at that game. It was nuts.]

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[Old Time Cub Fan]

Great article remembering a very interesting Cub. I thought he would be very good. Lack of power was his downfall. However, I remember him hitting tons of homers in batting practise. It never translated into game power. 

[CubinNY]

The Cubs did him wrong. With his wing he was never going to hit for power, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been a very useful player. 

[chopsx9]

Both he and Derek May were guys that I figure if they'd been in a position where they could have been left alone to play full time for another year or two they both could have had pretty decent long term MLB careers.  Though I'm sure there are plenty of those guys currently at Ford Dealerships right now.