“Half the stuff he says I have no idea what he’s talking about,” Wright said.

Nevertheless, the result for Murphy is a smooth line-drive approach that never goes away. In seven seasons in Queens, Murphy has batted .288 and earned enough status among his peers to make the National League All-Star team in 2014.

And this season, his walk year, has been one of his finest. His 54 extra-base hits ranked fifth among all second basemen, and, according to FanGraphs, his strikeout percentage (7.1) was the lowest in all of baseball among qualified batters. His swing-and-miss rate (3.9 percent) was the second lowest.

In those instances when he fell into a funk, he prayed to get himself through it. For if hitting is Murphy’s signature as player, his deepening religious faith in recent years has also come to define him as a person.

That transition began after the 2011 season, one in which he batted .320 over 109 games before sustaining his second serious knee injury in two years. Despite the physical setbacks he had encountered, Murphy said he felt real satisfaction in how he had played that season, proving for the first time that he was not only a capable everyday player, but a borderline elite hitter.

And yet, he said, he also felt empty. Which in turn, led him to emphatically turn to Christianity.

Murphy started reading the Bible daily, taking notes as he went, and bringing it to the ballpark. The next off-season, when he proposed to Tori, who is now his wife, he read her Bible passages. He started writing the words “salt” and “light” in his baseball cap, a reference from the Gospel of Matthew.

He began to pray before, during and after games to calm himself and center his focus. As best he could, he tried not to let his obsession with hitting and his desire to do well on the field push aside his faith. “I’m playing for Christ’s glory,” Murphy said recently. “That’s the one I forget a lot. I like to substitute Christ’s glory for Daniel’s glory.”