Donnie Murphy? Why?

I’m not in the business of taking jabs at other Florida Marlins blogs. In fact, Craig and GameFish of FishStripes and Ted and Dave of Marlins Diehards are some excellent folks who do some really good work in their niche of the Marlins (limited) blogosphere. But this comment from Craig at FishStripes is a little puzzling to me:

"These are things that will be worked in Spring Training, but I will say this: if Donnie Murphy is healthy and he is not on the 25-man roster, I will be pissed. And I don’t think that I am the only one."

He is speaking in regards to the currently vacant third base job (I am considering it vacant because I believe neither Emilio Bonifacio nor Matt Dominguez are ready to take on that job). My question is why we care all that much about Donnie Murphy? This is Donnie Murphy in a nutshell:

Unfortunately, I think a lot of fans are seeing this:

Now, neither of these estimates are very good at telling me what Murphy will do next season, but I have to believe the 411 career PA say a ltitle bit more than the 47 power-packed, clutch PA from last season. Still, is there any reason to believe that Murphy is anything other than a Quad-A player, just another guy from the minors?  He’s bounced around a few organizations and gotten nowhere despite tearing up Triple-A pitching (in his late 20’s). How is he any different than, say, Brian Barden, who is a career .292/.352/.444 hitter in seven seasons (2758 PA!) but is a career .211/.268/.303 hitter (.252 wOBA) in the majors? Could it be that, in his 37 major league PA with the Marlins in 2010, he only hit .179/.281/.179, and thus didn’t earn the interest of Marlins fans?

Anything can happen in less than 50 PA. A player can look terrible or great, and there won’t be much predictive value going forward. The Marlins are close enough to contention that they should be considering a name in the outfield like Scott Hairston who could push a Donnie Murphy or Emilio Bonifacio to the minors, rather than settling on who they have right now and hoping for the best. This extends not only to who the last guy is on the bench but to who the team mans as their final starter on the infield.