MILWAUKEE -- William Contreras sprinted toward first base, then launched himself headfirst at the bag. He was out on a routine grounder. His Brewers teammates tried to hide their smiles.
A night earlier, manager Pat Murphy had pulled the catcher from a game after he didn’t run hard on a ground ball. Now Contreras had delivered his answer as plainly as he could, and Murphy was laughing in the dugout.
That exchange says everything about how Murphy manages. He will pull a rookie for failing to meet his standard. He will pull one of his most accomplished players, too. And the next day, they can laugh together. It resonates. It’s authentic.
The approach has carried Milwaukee to 103 wins, the best in baseball and a franchise record. At 67 years old, Murphy has won National League Manager of the Year in each of his first two seasons leading the Brewers. After this season, he has a compelling case to win it again. No manager has ever won the award three years in a row; Murphy could be the first, in his first three seasons with Milwaukee.
Now the Brewers await the Cubs or Padres for Saturday’s NL Division Series opener. The World Series remains the one destination they have yet to reach.
Ask Murphy how he knows when a player needs a stern message, encouragement or nothing at all, and he won’t offer a formula.
“I’m just trying to figure it out,” Murphy said. “I don’t really have a system to it.”
His players have spent three seasons figuring it out with him.
“You have to be a certain kind of player to play for Murph and to play here,” Christian Yelich said after Murphy benched rookie Cooper Pratt during an August game against the Mets. “You couldn’t coach that way throughout the league. You really couldn’t.”
Murphy spent years coaching at Notre Dame and Arizona State University before reaching a Major League dugout. There are traces of that college coach in the way he addresses mistakes immediately and holds veterans and rookies to the same standard. But Yelich, Milwaukee’s newly named captain, believes the people receiving the message matter as much as the message itself.
“I think it’s having the right guys that are responsive to that,” Yelich said. “I don’t think that would work on every team in the league.”
Sal Frelick sees the same connection. He has been pulled from games by Murphy, and he was among the teammates who checked on Pratt after the rookie was benched in New York. To Frelick, Murphy’s style works because he knows his clubhouse.
“The players he wants to play his brand of baseball are also the same players that he can bench when they don’t play well,” Frelick said. “Good will come of it.”
That can mean a public correction. It can also mean taking a little longer on the mound to tell a pitcher he did a good job.
When Murphy removed Robert Gasser during a Sept. 1 start against the Cubs at Wrigley Field, Gasser was disappointed in his outing. Murphy took time to tell him what he had liked. Gasser later said those words meant a lot and gave him confidence moving forward. He’s proved it in his four starts since the pep talk, allowing just three runs over 22 innings.
Before Luis Lara came to the plate with the bases loaded in extra innings against Chicago on Sept. 8, Murphy approached the young outfielder. Lara was hitless in four at-bats. Murphy asked whether he was ready and told him he had confidence in him. Lara delivered a walk-off single.
Murphy waved away the idea that he had unlocked anything.
“I really don’t think that conversation mattered,” he said. “It was probably more for me, so I was participating, I guess.”
That answer sounds familiar to Craig Counsell, who played for Murphy at Notre Dame, worked alongside him in Milwaukee and now manages the Cubs. Asked about Murphy’s style, Counsell pointed to its consistency.
“It’s authentic,” Counsell said. “That’s the number one thing. It’s just who he is.”
Asked whether Murphy had used any particular motivational tool on him in college, Counsell leaned back and sighed. A reporter asked if swearing was involved. “That’s the first thing that came to mind,” Counsell joked. Then he settled on “good cop and bad cop,” used in varying ways.
Murphy is less certain he always gets the balance right. He said he has misread plenty of people. He suspects players don’t enjoy his pep talks any more than his criticism. And years as Milwaukee’s bench coach taught him that sometimes the better choice is to say nothing.
“Sometimes your non-message is better than your message,” Murphy said.
His players have seen both sides of him. Pratt’s benching was a reminder of the standard. Contreras’ dive was a playful acknowledgment that the standard applied to him, too. The relationships are strong enough to hold up when Murphy enforces it.
Murphy would rather credit the players than his own sense of timing.
“When you have a good team, it makes the manager’s moves look right,” he said.
This team has made him look right 103 times this year. Now the Brewers will find out where that understanding of one another can take them in October.