Where Have You Gone, Chris Murphy?
Murphy's one season here as the ace pitcher for the 1995 Princeton Reds was "big" in every sense of the word. All the 6' 7" left-hander, a 39th round draft pick out of the University of Cincinnati, did was compile a 7-1 record with a league-leading 1.55 earned run average while stubbornly yielding only 11 earned runs and 19 walks in 64 innings of work.
He is now still living life big today in Cincinnati and making a difference in peoples' lives in his eighth year as an investigator with the Hamilton County (OH) Department of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities.
"It (his current job)is an interesting field and my job is to help ensure that people with these disabilities are being treated right. I investigate reports of abuse and help create a plan of action to correct these situations," commented Murphy in a January 9 telephone interview.
He certainly had the right plan of action for his professional debut season in 1995, establishing himself as the team's "money" pitcher. In fact his only loss was a 5-0 verdict versus Burlington in which all five runs were unearned in an 11:30 a.m. game played at Bluefield's Bowen Field as a result of the late-June, 1995 flood that temporarily damaged Hunnicutt Field's playing surface.
Actually, that plan of action all started with two college stints in his career. Murphy began his college career in 1990-1993 at Wright State University, where was one of his early teammates, Jeff Ashton, later played second base for the 1992 P-Reds. "Murph" later pitched the 1994 and 1995 spring seasons for the University of Cincinnati before the Cincinnati Reds came calling and assigned him to Princeton for the beginning of the 1995 Appalachian League season. It was a beginning he clearly remembers as well as the chance to pitch for 1995 P-Reds' manager Brad Kelley, one of only two people to have his jersey number retired in Princeton.
"I had a buddy that had once pitched for a team Brad Kelley coached and he told me when I got to Princeton to listen to what Brad had to say. Brad knew since I was an older player (23 years old) that I could take critcism a little better than the younger guys. He did tell us before the season that none of us would stay in long enough to get a complete game but he let me get one that year anyway against Kingsport," recalled Murphy, who won the Appy League's E.R.A. title in 1995 to make it the third year in a row (1993-Roger Etheridge and 1994-Cedric Allen) that a Princeton pitcher had nailed down this honor.
His memory is also vivid when asked whether Princeton was the right place to begin a professional baseball career.
"The thing I liked most about Princeton was the people. I remember driving through town and seeing all the signs on the businesses that said 'Go Reds' and calling to tell my folks all about those marquee signs. I just remember how everyone took care of us and I also never will forget winning those 'Player of the Game' cards that gave me the chance to eat those free meals at Roma III," said Murphy.
While Murphy was the man in the spotlight during that 1995 season, there were three other pitchers on that P-Rays' mound staff that went on to pitch in the big leagues: Mark Corey, Lance Davis, and Jeff Sparks.
"The only one that surprised me out of those three was Lance Davis because even though he had good stuff and location, he did not really throw that hard," summarized Murphy.
However, all the success Murphy enjoyed at Princeton brought a late-season promotion to Cincinnati's high full-season "A" team at the time, the Winston-Salem Warthogs. He remembers how he got the news in a fashion that only Brad Kelley could deliver.
"Brad called me into his office and said that he had been getting a lot of complaints from the community on my behavior and that their only option was to ship me out. Then he told me I was making the big jump to Winston-Salem," recalled Murphy, who added that Winston-Salem did not have the personal touch of following their team like the people in Princeton.
Murphy returned to Winston-Salem for the entire 1996 season, where he recorded an 8-11 record in 29 appearances (19 starts) with 80 strikeouts versus 36 walks in 123 innings of work. He even notched a "save" after being reassigned to the bullpen to work on the refinement of some of his pitches. He recalled his time there at the end of 1995 and all of 1996 and the change in the caliber of play he encountered-.
"When I first got to the Warthogs from Princeton, I stayed with the same stuff that was getting me a lot of ground balls. But then I got in awe of some of the guys I was facing and did not have as much success. I started overthrowing and got ahead of myself. I tried to blow it past people, got knocked around some and that's when I was sent to the bullpen to work some things out," he noted while also remembering one game in particular versus future major league superstar outfielder Andruw Jones.
"I remember striking out Andruw Jones on three straight curve balls and then I started him out with a curve ball on his next at-bat and he absolutely crushed it," chuckled Murphy.
After the 1996 season, he received the news by mail that he had been released by the Reds and said the news hit him like "a ton of bricks," adding he opened that envelope in the company of his father, who taught him to play the game, and his then four-year old son. The past, present, and future all were merged together at that moment in the Murphy household as the next move was yet to present itself.
That time in his life actually involved attending a tryout camp in 1997 with the newly formed Tampa Bay Devil Rays' farm system. Despite throwing "93" on the radar gun at the camp, Murphy quickly realized that being 25 years old at the "A" ball level is like being 45 years old at the major league level, that doors are quickly shut on you and blocking your path to the big leagues. However, he did have one more year in 1997 of professional baseball still to come on his resume'.
That came in the form of the Chilicothe (OH) Paints of the independent Frontier League. Murphy, who wanted to get to work on finishing his college degree, couldn't refuse the Paints' offer of him only having to pitch home games and not having to travel with the team while at the same time making the same money he was in the Reds' organization. But, as Murphy defined it, he just could not get fired up about pitching in independent ball-it just wasn't the same. With that, the professional pitching career of Chris Murphy came to a close.
Back to college he went, obtaining his B.A. degree in Communications from the University of Cincinnati and then later receiving his Master's Degree in Addiction Studies from the same school in 2005. He is happily married to his wife, Kristi, a speech pathologist, and has two sons C.J. (16 years old), Hunter (5), and a daughter, Lauren (3). He is living a blissfully happy family life in what he describes as the "tight-knit" neighborhood on the West Side of Cincinnati, where everybody knows everybody and with his family only living three blocks from his parents.
His time around the bases now is pretty much confined to playing softball with his buddies, but there was a time that he was teaching baseball to his son, just as Murphy's father had taught baseball to him.
"I coached my oldest boy in baseball for awhile and I enjoyed that. He has already grown to 6'5" and is playing high school volleyball and that is the direction he is going," said Murphy.
With all the things Chris Murphy has already experienced at the still-young age of 35, it is easy to predict that one day his oldest son will have a "big" story also to tell.