Muncy's career is going deep
The underrated Dodger slugger is second on the L.A. home run list.
“Back in school again
Maxwell plays the fool again
Teacher gets annoyed
Wishing to avoid an unpleasant scene
She tells Max to stay when the class has gone away
So he waits behind
Writing 50 times, ‘I must not be so-o-oh-o.”
Whenever the Dodger Stadium sound system takes a break from its brain-busting treachery, Dieter Ruehle comes to the rescue. Ruehle is the organist who tries to play something connected with the Dodgers themselves, as Nancy Bea Hefley did when she heralded Orel Hershiser with “Master of the House.”
For years Ruehle has played “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” whenever Max Muncy has appeared. Like the protagonist in the Beatles’ song from “Abbey Road,” Muncy has a way of hiding in plain sight. He’s a career .232 hitter, a 5-foot-10 fellow who turns 36 on August 25. He usually can be found on the second half of the Dodgers’ lineup card. He is no danger of winning Gold Gloves, although he’s worked diligently to get respectable at first and third base. And in a lineup of human conglomerates, Muncy is making $10 million this year and next.
But when the Dodgers need a late-inning push, it’s notable how often the game has come down to Muncy and his hammer. That’s when his strike-zone radar kicks in. Pitchers will tempt him with fastballs, a fingernail off the plate, and Muncy will either take them or foul them off, confident that something juicy will present itself. When it does, Muncy will take a compact, forceful home run swing. It has produced more longballs than anyone in L.A. Dodger history except Eric Karros.
Muncy hit his 229th as a Dodger last Wednesday in Philadephia, off Aaron Nola. That broke a tie with Ron Cey. Karros has 270. Muncy has more homers for the Dodgers than Mike Piazza, Frank Howard, Davey Lopez, Pedro Guerrero,Matt Kemp, Raul Mondesi , Adrian Beltre or Steve Garvey. And No. 229 broke a 3-3 tie in the sixth inning of a Dodger win.
But the two previous home runs meant more. The night before, Muncy beat Zack Wheeler, the richest pitcher in the N.L., with a 2-run shot when the Dodgers were down -1 in the fourth. Four nights before that in Yankee Stadium, Muncy took Gerrit Cole deep in the seventh inning, another 2-run homer that created a 2-1 lead. He also homered off Wheeler on May 29 at home.
Muncy surfaced in 2018, unbeknownst to all but the most fanatic minor league followers. He hit 35 home runs for the Dodgers that year, leading the team, in just 481 plate appearances. His .582 slugging percentage led the Dodgers, too. He is the only player still wearing blue from those days, and he’s the 34th player in alltime franchise history, encompassing Brooklyn, to play 1,000 games in that uniform. Muncy is 13 home runs away from catching Roy Campanella, No. 4 on the Dodger list.
He has two 36-homer seasons and two 35-homer seasons. He has 20 this season, and his .253 average is his best since that rookie season, but that’s not as important to the Dodgers as his eerily reliable OPS, which is .830 for his career and .851 this season. He started hesitantly in 2025 but never dreamed his 20-12 vision could be the problem. Then he took an eye exam, which revealed astigmatism in his left eye. Muncy began wearing glasses and the focus returned.
Through all this Muncy has helped the Dodgers visit four World Series and win three, and their 67-39 record (as of Monday) is the best in MLB. But he’ll always wince when he thinks of 2021. He and his club were never better. Muncy had a career-high .895 OPS and the Dodgers won 106 games. But on the last day of the regular season, first baseman Muncy collided with Milwaukee baserunner Jace Peterson and tore the ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow. He did not play a postseason game, and the Dodgers eventually lost to Atlanta in a 6-game N.L. Championship Series, with Albert Pujols playing first base against lefties and Cody Bellinger against righties, with infielder Gavin Lux trying to play centerfield.
But Muncy also repudiates the Dodgers’ reputation for winning by printing currency He’s not the only one, of course. Justin Turner was a key figure in the first part of this Dodgers’ run, and he was playing in a Cal State Fullerton alumni game when coach Tim Wallach recruited him. Andy Pages has been the Dodgers’ best offensive player this year, and he was a $300,000 international sign in 2018. Justin Wrobleski has stood guard over the battered starting rotation, and he was an 11th-round draft in 2021. The seasons are full of stories like this, with foot soldiers who learned winning in the Dodger organization.
Muncy might be the most unlikely. He was a well-known hitter at Baylor and the Athletics drafted him in the fifth round. He was almost perfect for the Moneyball ethic, because he walked and he homered for a living. But Muncy didn’t play well when the A’s gave him a chance. Later he said he was too worried about getting sent down. Oakland released him, but executives Fahran Zaidi and Eric Kubota didn’t forget him.
Zaidi became Andrew Friedman’s assistant with the Dodgers and recommended they sign Muncy, who wasn’t sure he wanted to continue. But that first Dodgers’ season was spent entirely at Oklahoma City. Muncy came up the next spring when Logan Forsythe went on the disabled list, and he hasn’t left yet.
In a truly bizarre development, he then became one of two Max Muncys in MLB. The second one — Maxwell Price Muncy, as opposed to the Dodgers’ Maxwell Steven — was picked in the first round of the 2021 draft, from Camarillo (CA) High. Beyond that, both Muncys celebrate their birthday on Aug. 25. The two met in the Pacific Coast League, when MP Muncy was playing for Las Vegas, and MS Muncy was rehabbing with Oklahoma City. They both laughed about that, and Oakland’s Muncy talked about reserving tickets to the Phoenix PGA Tour event, and seeing the disappointed looks at Will Call when he, not the famous Dodger, picked them up.
It took some people a while not to call the Dodger slugger Max Mercy, after the cynical sportswriter that Robert Duvall played in “The Natural,” and told Robert Redford, “They come and they go, Hobbs, they come and they go.”
But Muncy isn’t going anywhere. He has already produced some of the keynote homers in L.A. franchise history. He took Nathan Eovaldi deep in the 18th inning of World Series Game 3 in 2018, giving the Dodgers the only win in that series. He homered at the bleakest moment of Game 7 in Toronto last year, cutting the Blue Jays lead to one run and setting things up for Miguel Rojas and Will Smith.
In 2026 Muncy launched a homer into McCovey Cove off San Francisco’s Madison Bumgarner, who didn’t like Muncy’s home run trot. “If you don’t want to watch me run, you can go get it out of the ocean,” Muncy yelled, which launched a few blue T-shirts at the Dodger Stadium shop.
Rose and Valerie, screaming in the gallery
Maxwell must go free
The judge did not agree and he told them so-o-oh-o
But as the words were leaving his lips
A noise came from behind
Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer came down on his head
Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer made sure he was dead.
Reportedly, “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was despised by all the Beatles except Paul McCartney, who wrote it, and it made Rolling Stone’s list of 50 terrible songs on great albums.
But when the only thing that can shield a Dodger fan’s eardrums from total dissipation is the sight of Muncy doing what he was put here to do, it’s a chorus worth the hallelujah. Better yet, it’s not Sweet Caroline.
I always felt irritated when Muncy beat the Braves because I didn’t really think he deserved a star turn. He was ordinary. Should’ve been an out. But he invariably would tie the game with a 2-run double (or worse) and I would curse!