He is Pat Murphy, 2024 NL Manager of the Year.
In professional sports, coaches and managers often command respect through the projection and the stories of their own playing experience. Tales of “I remember when” could leave a group of young, impressionable players with a sense of admiration and create a patriarchal footprint in the clubhouse.
Players might assume that if anyone should lead the team in a coaching or advisory role, it should probably be someone who has walked in their shoes, someone who has played at the same level, faced the same adversity, and achieved the same level of accolades and success that the players aspire towards when they hit the field. A coach likely should have played the game at some point in his or her life to understand the intricacies and strategy required to produce a winning team.
However, it is becoming more apparent that the coach or manager is required to be a teacher in addition to a mentor and strategist on the field. This requirement suggests that a manager or coach’s pathway to the top of their profession might not simply be a pivot from retired player to newly introduced coach.
Moving up from high school to college to professional ranks exclusively as a coach is proving to be the way of wisdom. By hiring someone who has risen through the ranks in this way, an organization can find itself with a manager or coach who can lead a club to lasting success.
Courtesy Milwaukee Magazine
Nowhere has an example of this pathway to success culminated so strongly as it has with 2024 NL Manager of the Year Pat Murphy of the Milwaukee Brewers. At the age of 65 and through his second season at the helm for the Brewers, Murphy led the club to a second-straight NL Central division title and playoff appearance after taking over the reins from the departing Craig Counsell, who is now the manager of the Chicago Cubs.
That changing of the guard closed a chapter on a long-standing player-coach and coach-manager relationship that had been fortified over more than three decades.
Before winning two World Series during a solid 16-year MLB career, Counsell was recruited to play baseball for Pat Murphy at the University of Notre Dame. Anchoring the middle infield over four winning seasons with the Irish, coach Murphy was quoted as saying that Craig Counsell “would be the next Notre Dame player to play in MLB.”
That bold statement proved accurate, but (for his part) Counsell quickly attributes his success as a player to Murphy. He alludes to Murphy’s influence as the primary catalyst for the turnaround of the Notre Dame baseball program, from almost extinction to a perennial ACC contender and top 25-ranked program.
ASU’s Jim Brock (photo courtesy of The State Press)
Before Murphy’s seven years in South Bend, he started as the head baseball coach and assistant football coach at Division III Maryville College. He then moved to Claremont, California, for the same joint assignment with that school’s football and baseball program.
The relationships that Murphy fostered and grew to maintain through his success at Notre Dame catapulted him into legendary status. He left Indiana to become the head coach at Arizona State, succeeding the winningest and most tenured coach in college baseball history, the late Jim Brock. Murphy led the Sun Devils to the postseason in nine straight seasons (1995-2009), was named PAC-10 Coach of the Year four times, and led ASU to a College World Series four times. There, he helped groom players like Dustin Pedroia, Andre Ethier, and Ike Davis to distinguished and lasting professional careers.
However, in 2009, an NCAA investigation into recruiting violations led Murphy to depart ASU for the professional ranks in the San Diego Padres system. Murphy was never found guilty of any breach but did admit to responding to allegations with a “cavalier attitude.”
Over the next 15 years, Murphy was a coach in the Padres system before being named interim Manager following Bud Black’s firing. However, he wasn’t retained following that interim appointment.
Craig Counsell as a Brewer (photo courtesy Spectrum News)
At that point–and in a twist to the career pathway of a baseball lifer–Murphy joined Craig Counsell’s Milwaukee Brewer’s staff. Murphy took cues from his former star player and learned the intricacies of managing a big league clubhouse effectively.
Success would soon follow in the players he helped shape, the relationships he built and maintained, and his relentless commitment to teaching and learning about the game. It paid dividends, too. The game Pat Murphy has given so much to is now giving back, and accolades continue accumulating, most recently when he was named NL Manager of the Year.
Murphy’s success brings two thoughts to mind. The first—similar to Atlanta Braves skipper and 2018 NL Manager of the Year Brian Snitker—is that a manager does not have to be an experienced MLB player to achieve remarkable success. The second is that a successful manager does need to be a “baseball lifer” with a proven record as a teacher of the game and the ability to elevate the game of talented players.
It means that a successful college coach can be a successful MLB manager, and Murphy is proof of that. MLB front offices should take note.
