The guy is amazing at hitting. We have opposite approaches when it comes to hitting. He is technical, he’s got everything, like every pitch – it’s like science watching him hitting. Me, I’m like pure chaos and I swing as hard as I can.

– Ike Davis, on Mets Hot Stove.

Well that’s just a cool quote. Also, I think “Pure Chaos” would be a cool nickname for someone, but probably not Ike Davis. Probably better for Murphy, actually.

I brought this up on the podcast last week but in case you don’t listen or didn’t make it to that hour: Willie Harris told Mets Weekly producer Joe Kraus, who sits right across from me in the office here, that Murphy knows more about hitting than anyone he has ever played with. Harris said he wants to be a manager someday, and he wants Murphy to be his hitting coach. So that’s… notable, I guess.

When we talk about the Citi Field walls coming in, the first players that come up are David Wright and Jason Bay — for obvious reasons. People seem to assume the walls will mean a couple extra easy homers for Ike Davis and Lucas Duda, but that those guys would hit them out anywhere. And Ruben Tejada and Josh Thole don’t have much power to speak of, so it’s hard to figure how the walls will really impact their onslaught of slapped singles.

Murphy gets lost in that discussion, I think. Part of that is that he hits left-handed, and the changes to the right-field side of the fence don’t seem as dramatic as those to the former Great Wall of Flushing. Plus, though Murphy has doubles power, he’s not a home-run hitter: He has all of 20 in 1030 Major League at-bats.

Do some of Murphy’s doubles become home runs with the new dimensions? Just based on his spray chart from TexasLeaguers.com, it doesn’t look like many of them do. And of course, the way defenders position themselves with the new walls affects which hits will fall in and which one-time doubles outfielders might now get to. But does Murphy — man of hitting science, impressor of Willie Harris — adjust somehow to try to hit for more power? Should he?

I suppose that’s something to ask him about come Spring Training. Which I suppose makes for a decent segue to this: I’m going to be in Port St. Lucie for a couple of weeks in early March. I’ve got some things I know I want to do already, but maybe there’s something Spring Training-related you want to know about that you don’t know about yet. I’ll probably ask this again, but use the following form for any suggestions you might have for Spring Training content you want to see:

[contact-form-7 id=”15378″ title=”Untitled”]