Brewers manager Pat Murphy’s painful lessons fuel his team’s success

MILWAUKEE — The odds-on favorite to win National League Manager of the Year is sitting at his desk, leaning forward in his chair when the trap door to the past comes creaking open.

"I can tell you a horrible memory," Pat Murphy says.

The man who now manages the Milwaukee Brewers was a 13-year-old boy when his father, Ty, tried to get off the bottle. He quit booze cold. His older brothers took his mother out of the house, because these things were always hard. So there was Murphy, 13 years old and essentially alone, when the delirium tremens set it. In the next room, his father shook and hallucinated. Soaked the sheets with cold sweats. Begged his 13-year-old son to go get him a six-pack. During the night, Murphy heard his father's heavy breaths. Gasps for air.

"I was almost hoping sometimes — and I hate to verbalize this — but I was almost hoping he would die," Murphy says. "That it would be easier, you know?"

Then the gasps turned more frantic. Then ... silence. Fear. What if it actually happened? Who would the boy call? What would he do?

Years later, counselors tried to explain: Do you realize you were abandoned?

Murphy never wanted that crutch. Both his parents loved him, he says. His mother was a saint. He always had a roof over his head, food on the table. He calls his father a wonderful man. They would sit in their Syracuse, N.Y., kitchen and talk about Pat's sports. Robert E. Murphy was nicknamed after Ty Cobb, and he would gaze out the window and watched his youngest son shooting hoops, beer in his hand. But Murphy never hugged his father until 10 days before Ty's death. The old man suffered from depression, Murphy believes now. The alcohol was self-medication, the addiction really a disease.

"There was a lot of rides in the backseat without seat belts," Murphy said, "and a dad who was seven or eight drinks in."

Murphy was in ninth grade the first time he sat behind the wheel of a car. His mother convinced Ty to talk to a local priest about their troubles. Ty and the priest ended up getting drunk. In the dead of a New York winter, Murphy drove his own father home.

A few years later, Murphy says he lost his license in a drinking mishap of his own, the cycle already repeating. He often skipped school and hitchhiked from place to place. He hung out with unsavory characters, threw full beer cans at houses for the hell of it. And he would walk alone after football practice at Christian Brothers Academy to Billy Harris' Syracuse Boxing Club on the city's south side. Then he would stroll home through the toughest part of town, finding some twisted sense of peace in the threat of danger. Harris, director of the hardscrabble boxing gym, once pulled him aside after he had just broken his nose for what felt like the umpteenth time.

"Murph," he would say, "what are you doing here?"

Almost 50 years later, Murphy swivels in his office chair. He turns toward the blue wall behind him. He traces a triangle with his fingers, showing the path he walked so many times. Home to Randall Road. Randall Road to Hudson Street. Hudson Street back home.

"My story, I don't ever tell (the players)," Murphy said. "But my story might be a little bit of the impetus that gets me to want to be like this, that wants to help these guys see what their possibilities are."

In most settings, Murphy is an oversharer by his very Irish Catholic nature. Relentlessly authentic. Boisterous and hilarious, sensitive and brooding. Arizona writer Scott Bordow put it best when he wrote many years ago: "You don't interview Pat Murphy. You listen to him bleed."

Murphy's Brewers have Major League Baseball 's ninth-lowest payroll and the smallest market size. They also happened to run away with the National League Central, clinching the team's third division title in four years with 10 games remaining. Murphy is a man driven by doubts, real or invented. In that sense, he and the Brewers are a perfect pairing.

Ten months ago, Murphy bled his way through deliberations on whether to take this job. He was replacing Craig Counsell, the sharp manager who, in another lifetime, Murphy mentored as the baseball coach at Notre Dame. In a role reversal, Murphy spent eight seasons out of the spotlight as Counsell's bench coach. Now at 65, he had two young sons at home, and the Brewers were viewed less as sure-fire contenders and more as small-budget rebuilders.

He took the job anyway, the only lead gig he never pushed and prodded for, and bled his way through the 2024 season. Christian Yelich , the team's most decorated veteran, gave Murphy his blessing early, and the manager still keeps a yellow jersey hanging on his office door. It is a nod to Patches O'Houlihan, the contrived coach character from the movie "Dodgeball" who Yelich likens to his fiery and fearsome manager.

Murphy took over a club with a nondescript roster. Many of their players are young. Local stars such as Willy Adames and William Contreras remain nationally underrated. Even their larger-than-life manager has a generic name — Pat Murphy — that could lead outsiders to believe he is just another front-office proxy donning a ballcap.

Before the year, the Brewers cut payroll and traded ace Corbin Burnes. On the first day of spring, All-Star closer Devin Williams was lost for months with fractures in his back. In his inaugural address to the team as manager, Murphy set the edict: The Brewers were going to be taken lightly, but that should not define them.

"He's followed up," pitcher Aaron Ashby said. "He's been an unbelievable manager this year."

The underdog Brewers have become built in Murphy's image. He has the word relentless tattooed on his forearm, and the team's play — all that running and risk-taking, the no-name pitchers thriving in big spots, the injuries and adversity they've battled all season — reflects the ethos of a first-year skipper who forged an iron chin in his hometown boxing gym. Advanced stats indicate only two teams have played better defense. Only one team has stolen more bases. No team has won more games with its bullpen. "He wants to win," second baseman Brice Turang said. "But he also understands he's got to have everybody's back."

Pitcher Tobias Myers told MLB Network radio: "He's a little intimidating, but he's also hilarious. He's a teddy bear."

Even on the best days, Murphy bleeds all different colors. Media sessions often turn to comic bits. "I rate myself as 70 funny," Murphy said one afternoon, speaking in the 20-80 scale of scouting parlance. There was a tight game against the Dodgers when rookie Garrett Mitchell stood on first base, stationary despite a pitcher with a slow delivery. After batter Rhys Hoskins took multiple pitches but Mitchell remained at first, Murphy barked across the diamond at Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman : Will you tell Mitchell to run?

On the night the Brewers clinched the division, Murphy stood in the center of the clubhouse with legendary radio broadcaster Bob Uecker. If Murphy is the avatar of the 2024 Brewers, Uecker is a living symbol for the entire franchise.

"There is no one who epitomizes being a champion like this man does," Murphy announced.

Under his breath, for effect, Uecker uttered: "I peed my pants!"

Earlier that day, Murphy revisited a moment in spring training, just before the team departed its Arizona base and began a 162-game venture. PECOTA, the game's most reputable projection system, picked his team to win 79 games.

Murphy, the manager self-conditioned for struggle, scowled under the sun and predicted: "It's a bunch of guys I think the fans will fall in love with. Be careful, because they might just believe themselves right into contention."

Murphy is here at the pinnacle of his professional life, but only in the past few years has he really started putting together the pieces of his own story.

Murph, what are you doing here?

"I still deal with all sorts of demons and other stuff," he says. "I don't drink or do drugs, I'm not out there chasing. ... I don't have any other s— like that." He points both index fingers toward his temples.

"All my s–," he says, "is in here."

For so long his life was one of wandering. He searched for a home, yearned for meaning, worked for acceptance. The nights walking down the streets turned to days on long stretches of road, driving with no real destination. "I wanted to do something special," he says. "I felt it in me, that I just needed something."

Like his father, Murphy was a diehard fan of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. He'd gather friends and hitchhike to South Bend. They hopped on the back of trains, tried to hide under bleachers and lie their way into games. "He just was f—- crazy," longtime friend Gregory Dunn said, "but he drew people to him."

Murphy hurt his shoulder in high school, forged clearance from a doctor, then hurt the shoulder even worse. He briefly played JV basketball at Le Moyne College, then football and baseball at Bowling Green. Somewhere in there he spent a semester at Mount Saint Mary.

"I just couldn't find my home," he says. "I couldn't find a place."

Eventually he trekked south toward Miami with a halfhearted intention to enlist in Ray Dundee's boxing school. Instead he exited on Glades Road in Boca Raton in search of a restroom. He followed signs to a school he had never heard of, Florida Atlantic University.

In the perhaps apocryphal version of the story Murphy has sometimes told, he met coach Steve Traylor at a urinal. Traylor says it was in his office. They'll settle for the hallway that linked the two. Traylor was the baseball coach, starting a program from scratch.

"Do you have baseball?" Murphy asked.

"The legend of Murph," Traylor says now, "was born."

He was a pitcher and a catcher, and mostly, Traylor says, he was a natural leader. Murphy had a way of knocking down doors, and sometimes he wonders how he got that way. He thinks of his father, who once got them inside the locker room after a boxing match to meet the great Joe Louis. They had no passes or connections. "He'd just get his way in there," Murphy said. "Find his way in."

The winding continued. He coached football and baseball at Maryville College in Tennessee, and while coaching, he talked his way into a pro contract in the San Francisco Giants system. He returned to FAU as an assistant. He pitched and managed in the Northwest League, then coached at D-III Claremont-Mudd-Scripps in California. Somehow, because this is Pat Murphy we're talking about, he ended up pitching in Australia and then coached the Dutch national baseball team.

The year was 1987 and Murphy was 28 when a friend told him the baseball job was open at Notre Dame. The program was downtrodden. Murphy cold-called the athletic department and got an assistant named Jeanne Neely on the phone.

"I'm Pat Murphy, and I'm your next baseball coach," he said.

Two years later, with Murphy as their coach, the Irish made the postseason for the first time in 19 years. Murphy's father followed the season closely, but he never made it out to a game.

"I was on a quest back then," Murphy says. "It was about me. That stuff still haunts me at times. Your ego haunts you."

In 1990, a sports psychologist named Harvey Dorfman walked into Murphy's South Bend office. At first, Murphy was offended. Helping his players with the mental side of the game was supposed to be his responsibility.

Then they got talking. A few years into his dream job, Murphy's first marriage had crumbled. He was with a wonderful woman and wasn't honest with her, he says. Hated himself for it. This was also the year his father died, and the first time he sought formal counseling.

"I was inappropriate in many, many ways," Murphy says of his younger self. "I wasn't a developed character. I had a lot of stuff that was f— up about me."

Murphy's fire in those days knew no bounds. Practices were intense. His outbursts unpredictable. One day, a skinny but cerebral young infielder named Craig Counsell tracked down a fly ball and did not call it. Murphy stopped practice. Told Counsell not everyone was as instinctive as he was. Counsell lined up in the infield. Murphy hit him repeated grounders. He had to call every ball — Mine! Mine! Mine! — at the top of his lungs. The exercise went on until one ball hit the lip of the grass and popped Counsell in the face. Hardnosed as he was, Murphy undercut fear with humor. He let players know he believed in them. Helped them believe in themselves. When he was still bench coach with the Brewers, he once consoled Eric Thames, who had struck out three times, by saying: "Next time, why don't you grab the tennis racket in my office?"

"He's not hateable," said Mike Rooney, a Notre Dame walk-on who later coached for Murphy at Arizona State. "Maybe someone less fun, less charismatic, players or people working for him would go straight to, "I don't like this person,' but I don't think that's on the table with Murph."

Still, Murphy did himself few favors. Shortly after he left Notre Dame to run one Arizona State, one of the nation's premier programs, in 1995, Murphy told the Phoenix Gazette: "I'm good enough to manage in the major leagues. I'll probably have that chance. But I respect this program too much to be here a short time."

Those words did not play well. At ASU, Murphy barked at opposing players from across the field. He feuded — and later became friends — with coaches such as Arizona's Mike Gillespie. Baseball America dubbed him "Black Hat Pat." Rooney called working for Murphy at Arizona State "like a doctorate in baseball." But at tournaments, opposing coaches would often corner Rooney, awed by the persona. What's he like? Give me your best Murph story.

Here is a good one: At Arizona State, Murphy fought a priest.

By 1999, Joe Corpora had moved from South Bend to Arizona and took a job at a low-income parish. Murphy had a foundation that helped similar families. Corpora happened to have a newfound interest in boxing. Soon the priest and the baseball coach traded body blows in the Arizona State lobby and locker room. They staged a boxing match for charity, billed it as "Armageddon." The Priest vs. the Devil. For a few rounds, Counsell served as referee.

Corpora was a sparring partner but also a mentor. The guidance was personal as much as it was spiritual. When Corpora would ask if Murphy attended Sunday morning mass, Murphy would say: "I went to the church of St. Mattress."

Like many, though, Corpora was drawn to Murphy's multitudes. "He doesn't fit in a box," Corpora said. "People who don't fit in boxes are always very fascinating."

Over time, Corpora came to understand more. "He's a tender guy," Corpora said. "And I think that tenderness is borne from — I don't know if I should say this or not — but a lot of tough times in his personal life. His own suffering and his own missteps have caused him to become understanding and compassionate, not bitter."

Ty Murphy loved the racetrack. Took his family and bet the horses. They stayed if he won, went home if he lost. On the good days, Murphy's mother collected the winnings. She stashed the $1s and $5s in her purse, handed some of them to attendants in the ladies' room.

Inside his office in Milwaukee, all these years later, Murphy reaches inside his backpack and pulls out a brown leather organizer. Inside, he flashes a stack of one- and five-dollar bills. He has saved them like that for years. He put them into a savings account for son, Kai. He says it totaled $88,000.

A shift began in 2000, when Kai was born. Another marriage ended in a nasty divorce. Murphy videoed into a hearing on the day of a College World Series game. He was eventually awarded full custody. Keli, his daughter from a previous relationship, came out to ASU for college. Corpora became Kai's godfather. And Murphy practically raised Kai from the dugout.

"I don't know," Kai says now, "if I'll ever be able to repay him."

It is untrue to say the coach mellowed all in one instant. But slowly, the outbursts lessened. Murphy still visited with Dorfman and other counselors. Cognizant his son was watching him, he grew more aware of his interactions with umpires, of his relationships with other coaches.

"Slowly, he's redefined his self as he wanted to redefine it," the late Dorfman once said. "He's had so many things to deal with within himself, things from his upbringing, perceived inadequacies and so on. ... But he's turned himself into something whole and viable after being perceived as something completely the opposite."

At home, Murphy would wash up after practice and tuck Kai into bed. Once, in the middle of reading a story, Murphy dozed off. Kai laughed as his father talked in his sleep, relitigating a decision to hit and run.

"Only as I've gotten older," Kai says, "did I come to realize, 'Man, he must have been really grinding those days.'"

The other inflection point came in 2009. That's when Murphy pulled Kai out of school. Sat him down and told him, "Dad's not the baseball coach at Arizona State anymore." The NCAA had come knocking. The whole thing got messy. Murphy was forced to resign. The investigation found ASU staff violated one-phone-call-per-week rules and made more than 500 impermissible calls. Players were paid improperly — though it was only $5,800 spread over 20 players — for work during Murphy's annual charity camp. The investigation cleared Murphy of unethical conduct but accused him of a "cavalier attitude" regarding the investigation. ASU, Murphy points out, was under heightened scrutiny because of prior violations in its football program.

Contentious with superiors for much of his time in Tempe, Murphy admits he grew confrontational, defensive, offended at the mere notion he was running a dirty program. Murphy's final record as a college baseball coach was 1,000-457-4.

"A gross injustice," he still calls the ASU situation. "But I'm an easy mark because I'm talkative and controversial and combative."

At 9 years old, Kai pulled all the Sun Devils gear from his closet. More than a decade later, he transferred to play at Arizona State. Today he is a minor-league outfielder in the San Diego Padres organization.

After losing the job at ASU, Murphy found himself searching again, at 50 years old this time.

"Believe me," Murphy says. "I was on my ass. I was really on my ass. But when your kids are watching, you got to show them the right thing."

As Murphy fought through a fog, the San Diego Padres extended a lifeline. He had built one of the nation's preeminent college programs, and now he was happy to be managing short-season A-ball for $30,000. His methods weren't supposed to work in pro ball. Too rah-rah. Too much enthusiasm. But in places like Eugene, Ore., and El Paso, Texas, Murphy did what he had always done: gained loyalty from players and won baseball games. Kai entered a homeschooling program and followed his father at every stop.

In Triple A, Murphy coached a former USC player named Jason Lane, who at 35, had just converted from position player to pitcher. When he learned Murphy was about to be his manager, Lane raised his eyebrows. "Wait, Pat Murphy, the old Arizona State coach'?" Lane said. "I was like, 'This should be interesting.' From Day 1 I got there, we've been pretty tight ever since."

By 2015, Murphy was interim manager of the San Diego Padres. He didn't get the job full time, something that gnawed at his ego again. But after that season, an old friend reached out. It was Counsell, the infielder Murphy once pushed at Notre Dame.

On many occasions, Counsell has listed the most influential people in his life: His mother. His father. Pat Murphy.

Counsell hired Murphy to be his bench coach with the Brewers, and not long after, Rooney talked with his old Notre Dame teammate about the odd match. Counsell's personality was measured and deliberate. Murphy carried an earthquaking aura.

Half-joking, Rooney asked: "What are you doing?"

Counsell responded: "That's exactly what I want."

When the big job came open, Murphy was not sure he wanted it.

"I didn't want to be part of a rebuild, and then when it gets built get kicked to the curb like a lot of these guys do," Murphy said.

There was more. He had endured a heart attack in the summer of 2020. Got rushed to the hospital and started getting questions about his next of kin. Now 65 years old, his youngest boys are 9 and 5. He splits custody, loves his children dearly, and parts of his personal life are still unsolved. Whether talking about himself or his baseball team, he often utters a maxim: "We're all under construction."

He's long been attracted to broken people, he says. He's a fixer by nature, another product of that upbringing. The same traits that can lead to personal turmoil are also his great strengths as a manager.

"You get older," he said, "and you see it in big, flashing, neon lights. 'It's not about me. It. Is. Not. About. Me.'"

But by the fall of 2023, Counsell left Milwaukee and took a massive contract to manage the Chicago Cubs . As the Brewers sought Counsell's replacement, the search began pointing to someone they already had. This past fall, general manager Matt Arnold gave the phone to his young son, Tyler, to officially offer Murphy the job.

These days Lane, the converted pitcher, is on the long list of players who have followed Murphy in multiple stops. He played for Murphy in El Paso and later San Diego. Now he is the Brewers' third-base coach.

"Timing," Lane said, "is everything. I think there was a reason why he was here."

On the Brewers' 145th day in first place, Murphy leans back in his office chair. He's still intense, still unafraid of confrontation, still operates best under a sense of affliction. But he regrets the way he used to treat players. These days he stresses to himself: Never be negative.

He thinks, too, of his parents. His mother was selfless to a fault, lived to serve others. From his father came ambition and intensity.

"I think they kind of concocted this recipe," Murphy says. "It didn't start tasting good until late in life. But it tastes good to me now."

Inside these confines, the manager's many mantras are everywhere. On his forearm, he has Bruce Springsteen lyrics tattooed: No retreat, no surrender. The team's "Win Tonight" slogan is displayed in big letters in the hallway leading to the dugout. The college mentality has played well with a young team.

"Maybe the more important myth that gets debunked in all this," Rooney says, "is just because you're one way as a younger person doesn't mean you have to be that way your whole life."

The Brewers wear navy T-shirts with a one-word slogan. This one is derived from a 1932 newspaper . After Ty Murphy died in 1990, Murphy was sorting through his father's things when he unearthed the old clipping detailing a high-school football game Ty quarterbacked. One paragraph read something like: "Murphy rolled to his right, nothing daunted ..." and ended with Ty throwing a touchdown.

Daunted? Nothing daunted? Murphy envisioned dark clouds. He also found the phrasing poignant. He altered the word to his liking. Now on his desk, Murphy has the word and its definition taped down on bright yellow paper.

Undaunted.

(Top photo: Scott Taetsch / )