The Brewers and Cubs are set to square off in the postseason for the first time, which means the most high-stakes reunion yet for Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy and Chicago skipper Craig Counsell. To tell the story of their friendship, we mined the archives of MLB.com for some of our favorite articles about these old friends and combined them into the following, with some fresh reporting added from Friday’s workout at American Family Field.
MILWAUKEE -- To understand what Pat Murphy means to Craig Counsell and what Counsell means to Murphy, you have to go back to a half-frozen field in South Bend, Ind., in the fall of 1989. The spindly shortstop from suburban Milwaukee had so irked his skipper with a series of errors that Murphy ordered Counsell to his position to field hotshot grounders.
One particularly hard-hit baseball took a bad hop, bounced up and broke Counsell's nose.
"His nose was over here at 4:15," Murphy said in a 2015 telling of this oft-repeated tale, holding his hand on the side of his face, "and then he was back at practice at 5:15 with his nose back in place and said, 'Hit me some more.'
"That taught me everything I needed to know. One, that he was destined to be undenied."
And the other thing?
"That I probably needed to back off a little bit," Murphy said.
Now here they are more than 35 years later, set to square off in a best-of-five National League Division Series beginning with Saturday’s Game 1 at American Family Field. It’s the latest installment of what Counsell has always artfully called a decades-long “baseball conversation” between two men who have alternated positions of power over the years, from coach to pupil at Notre Dame, to manager and bench coach for eight seasons with the Brewers, to even ground as rival skippers since Counsell left his hometown Brewers to manage the Cubs beginning last season.
News of Counsell’s departure shocked the baseball world at the GM Meetings the winter he opted to head to the North Side.
As soon as Counsell’s contract with the Brewers ran out, Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer rang up the manager to gauge his potential interest. Both Hoyer and Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts had given David Ross their backing for a return as the Cubs’ manager for ‘24, but Hoyer also did not want to leave this stone unturned.
"I felt like this is an opportunity that I wanted to try to seize,” Hoyer said at Counsell’s introductory press conference. “I felt like it was a shot I had to take.”
They met at Hoyer’s house and Counsell had a chance to discuss the state of the franchise, including its highly-regarded farm system and how the team planned on building another group capable of playoff runs like the star-studded core that captured the ‘16 crown. Much to the shock of Counsell’s home state, he signed a five-year, $40 million deal to join the rival Cubs.
When Counsell first donned his Cubs hat, he said he “underestimated” the backlash from Brewers fans.
“I’m very proud of what happened in Milwaukee,” Counsell said. “I think time will look favorably on what was accomplished in those nine years that I was a manager there. So, [a negative reaction] is there and it’s real and I understand it. I do. But I think time will help.”
Well, every time Counsell has been introduced pregame or made a pitching change in Milwaukee, the boos have rained down from the stands. Even still, the Brewers haven’t missed a beat on the field, capturing division titles in both seasons since Murphy took over for Counsell.
Murphy and Counsell have faced off a couple dozen times now between Spring Training and the regular season, so it’s not exactly novel. But even high-stakes games like the ones the teams played at Wrigley Field in the middle of August, when the Cubs were trying to make a late move and the Brewers were trying to hold them off on the way to securing the best record in Major League Baseball, pale in comparison with what awaits the men beginning Saturday.
It’s the first postseason matchup between these division rivals, who are separated by only 90 miles or so of Interstate 94.
“I really don’t think it’s about us at all,” Murphy said Friday on the eve of Game 1.
Counsell added: “I think we're over that part. We're getting ready for a playoff series and trying to advance to have a chance to play in the World Series. That's the job at hand right now, and that's the focus right now. We've already done the other stuff. That's how I'm looking at it.”
On all counts, the players set to take the field Saturday who know both men best, agreed.
“Probably half of our guys, maybe more than half, didn’t play for ‘Couns,’” said Brewers DH Christian Yelich, who did play for Counsell for six seasons that covered so many of the highs and lows of his career to date. “It’s still baseball. Managers put players in position to be successful but it’s different than other sports. It’s not like Couns has exotic blitz packages or a good play-action pass game or anything like that that’s going to make it difficult on us.
“I have a lot of respect for him. I think he’s great at what he does. But we’re not going to have to worry about the two-high safety look from Couns.”
What the managers do have to think about is familiarity. Given how many meaningful games the franchises have played in recent years, you might argue that nobody knows the Brewers better than the Cubs, and vice versa. Counsell, for example, said the Cubs’ advance scouting meeting about the Brewers on Friday was significantly shorter than the one earlier this week about the Padres.
And then there’s the personal familiarity that goes back decades to their formative years.
"When you go to college, you're growing up, you're learning about baseball, about life," Counsell said back in 2015. "It's an impressionable time in your life, and I learned a lot from him. More than anything, I think he was a person who made me mentally tough, because he challenges you a lot."
Murphy was less diplomatic.
"I was awful to him," Murphy said. "I was very, very hard on him. I thought he would never speak to me again, to be honest with you. I was a young coach. I was 27 years old myself, and though we won a lot of games I wasn't always appropriate. I wasn't always the best leader. He had every right to leave school if he wanted to. I think his dad being a Notre Dame guy, he wouldn't let him.
"[Counsell] kept getting better and better. When we were done with practice at night and you walk out and you hear someone hitting in the cage, you didn't have to look who it was. It was Counsell."
Counsell played four seasons at Notre Dame under Murphy from 1989-92, batting .339 as a senior for a team that played to within one game of the College World Series. After the Rockies drafted Counsell in the 11th round, Murphy placed a call and helped Counsell get an extra $1,000 -- boosting his bonus to a still-modest $5,000.
It sent Counsell on a professional career that included two World Series championships and 16 years in the Majors, followed by a stint in Milwaukee's front office and then back in the dugout. It was there where he became the winningest manager in Brewers history from 2015-23 and led the franchise into the greatest stretch of regular-season success in club history, which continued this season with a seventh postseason berth in the past eight years and a fifth division title in that span.
The two have stayed close the whole way. After the Brewers named him manager in May 2015, Counsell tried to hire Murphy, who was managing San Diego's Triple-A club, to join Milwaukee's coaching staff as an infield instructor. The Padres declined, ultimately promoting Murphy to interim manager in the big leagues that season and setting up a reunion at what was then known as Miller Park that August. Murphy’s Padres took three of four in the series.
The Padres let him go at season’s end, and with that, a path was cleared to rejoin Counsell as his bench coach with the Brewers beginning in 2016. They spent the next eight years side-by-side, emerging from a mini-rebuild to win the third division title in franchise history in '18 thanks to Milwaukee’s Game 163 triumph at Wrigley Field.
It was off and running from there. The Brewers made the postseason from 2018-21 and ‘23-24 with Counsell and Murphy at the helm, with reminders along the way of how much they meant to each other. The most jarring came during the ramp-up for the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, when Murphy suffered a heart attack on the field during a Brewers workout.
Thankfully, a Brewers athletic trainer noticed Murphy in distress. Thankfully, team physician Dr. Mark Niedfeldt was right down the hall. Thankfully, despite COVID restrictions Counsell was among the first to visit his old coach at Froedtert Hospital, where Murphy was in surgery 15 minutes after arrival.
“It’s a wake-up call for everybody,” Murphy said in November 2024, while the Brewers were introducing him as the 30th manager in franchise history. “You drive to the [hospital] and guys are asking me about next of kin and I’m more thinking about, like, ‘This is the worst ambulance I’ve ever seen. The last ride is going to be in this thing?’ Like, I was concerned. I go Uber Black, you know?
“I wasn’t thinking about the next stage. But then after a while, you start thinking about it and you’re like, ‘Be thankful.’”
Murphy is certainly thankful that Counsell arrived on campus so many years ago.
And the feeling is mutual, even if those baseball conversations are less frequent. Murphy said they still talk or text at least once a month, rarely about baseball.
"It’s changed in that we’re competitors instead of teammates,” Counsell said ahead of the first Cubs-Brewers meeting in the 2025 regular season. “I think during competitive times, it's different. It stays the same when we’re off game times. We’re friends.”
That won’t change, no matter what happens next for the Brewers and Cubs.
“I’m sure,” Murphy said earlier this year, “that all of you have great friends in the world, people that you’ve been associated with for many, many years in different ways. Maybe the relationship changed a little bit. Maybe you lived in the same town and now you don’t. But with really, really true friends, you don’t have to call them every day and say, ‘What happened last night? What did she say? What did he say?’ Craig and I will be close forever, you know? I respect him. I love him, I love his family.
"I know people would love for us to get in a fight and go back and forth between the Cubs and us, and have fights and all that stuff. Maybe that will happen, I don’t know. But we will always still be friends.”