The Atlanta Braves cannot catch a break with their catcher. They cannot catch a break with anything, honestly. Sean Murphy just got the worst possible diagnosis for a catcher with a wrist or hand injury, and Atlanta is going to feel it.
Murphy fractured his left middle finger on Sunday when Dodgers second baseman Hyeseong Kim caught his glove on a swing in the seventh inning. The Braves placed him on the injured list this week, retroactive to May 11. Manager Walt Weiss confirmed Tuesday that Murphy could miss up to eight weeks.
Eight weeks. For a catcher. With a fractured finger on his glove hand.
This is the second extended IL stint of the season for Murphy. He started the year on the shelf recovering from offseason hip surgery and missed the first 35 games of 2026. He returned in mid-April and immediately gave Atlanta the lineup punch they had been missing. Then this. The Braves are now looking at a player who will have appeared in roughly half a season of baseball by the time he is healthy again.
Atlanta moved fast to fill the spot. The team signed veteran free agent catcher Sandy Leon to a major league deal on Tuesday. Leon is 37 years old. He has not had more than 100 plate appearances in a season since 2019. He is the kind of signing a contending team makes when the options are limited and the depth chart is on fire.
The Braves have other internal options, but none of them inspire confidence. Drake Baldwin is the long-term answer at catcher and will get the bulk of the playing time. Behind him, Atlanta is stretched thin. Leon is the safety net. Baldwin handling 80 percent of the workload for the next two months is the realistic plan.
This injury hits a Braves team that is already running uphill. The pitching staff has been beat up. Multiple position players have been in and out of the lineup. The roster that was supposed to compete for another deep playoff run has spent most of 2026 looking like a triage center.
The eight-week timeline puts Murphy’s return somewhere in mid-July, just before the All-Star break or right after it. That is enough time for him to play roughly two months of regular season baseball before the playoff push begins in earnest. If he can come back at full strength and lock in for August and September, the Braves still have a chance to win the East.
But that is asking a lot from a player who has now suffered two major injuries in the span of seven months. The hip surgery rehab was already a question mark. Adding a fractured finger to the resume means Murphy will need to spend at least the first couple of weeks back at the plate getting his timing right, and finger injuries on catchers tend to linger longer than the box score timeline suggests.
The Phillies are sitting at the top of the NL East right now. The Mets are right behind them. The Braves are scuffling to stay in the wild card hunt. They cannot afford to lose their best offensive catcher for another two months and pretend nothing changed. The schedule does not care about injuries. Atlanta has to find a way to keep its head above water with Baldwin and Leon doing the heavy lifting behind the plate until Murphy gets back.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
