Daniel Murphy: Baseball's Worst Offensive First Baseman

One of the biggest questions Mets management will have to answer this off-season is what exactly do we have in Murph?

The simple facts are that he struggled mightily this year, and that he is statistically the worst hitting first baseman in all of baseball.

For our comparative analysis we used 325 at-bats as the baseline--then we looked at several categories including OPS, BA, SLG, HRs and RBIs--essentially how often does he contribute to his club by getting on-base and producing runs.

Murphy is at the very bottom of the pile.

• OPS: Dead last among our pool--27th of 27 eligible candidates.
• BA: 24 of 27--only Aubrey Huff, Jason Giambi and Carlos Pena trail Murph.
• HR: Again, dead last.
• SLG: 25th out of 27
• RBI: 26th out of 27--he leads Jason Giambi by one RBI

The most troubling aspect of his stats, in my opinion, is the OBP.

Here are his OBP numbers by month:
.373, .278, .298, .323, .304

His OPS is similarly troubling:
.800, .631, .618, .715, .725

Those numbers are bad for a defensively gifted but offensively challenged middle infielder, much less a first baseman.

So the question lingers...what to do about Murph and what to do about first base in 2010?

There's no easy answer.