Pat Murphy caps historic 2025 season with second consecutive Manager of the Year Award

When Pat Murphy took over as the manager of the Milwaukee Brewers prior to the 2024 season, it was the departure of his predecessor that dominated the headlines, not the arrival of the Murphy era in Milwaukee. The baseball world was too caught up in Craig Counsell's relocation to the North Side of Chicago to recognize that Milwaukee seamlessly replaced their former skipper with one who could prolong the Golden Age of Brewers baseball for several seasons to come.

Even still, Murphy's first full season as an MLB manager (he had a stint as the interim manager for the San Diego Padres back in 2015) included several obstacles, chief amongst them the departure of the team's ace, Corbin Burnes, during the offseason. With preseason projections expecting the Brew Crew to take a step back without Counsell in the dugout and Burnes on the bump, Murphy's squad defied expectations and defended their NL Central title with ease, holding a 10-game lead over the Chicago Cubs at the end of the 2024 regular season.

After a disheartening loss to the New York Mets in the 2024 NL Wild Card Round, Murphy was tasked with defending the Brewers' NL Central crown in 2025 without the assistance of Willy Adames, the team's shortstop and clubhouse leader during Murphy's inaugural season as manager, and Devin Williams, Milwaukee's All-Star closer who the team traded to the New York Yankees during the offseason.

Unsurprisingly, at this point, many baseball insiders expected the Brewers to take a step back in 2025, with a record hovering around the .500 mark being the common result from the many preseason projection models. None of them expected the Brew Crew to set a franchise record for wins in a single season, run away with the division for the third consecutive year, and finish with the best record in all of baseball. That, however, is exactly what they did, and as a result, just moments ago, Murphy was named the NL Manager of the Year for the second consecutive season.

Pat Murphy becomes the first manager to win Manager of the Year in each of his first two full seasons as skipper

With a franchise-record 14-game winning streak and 11 and eight-game winning streaks to go along with it, the Brewers won far more games than anyone anticipated they would in 2025. That success was in large part due to the culture that Murphy cultivated in the Brewers' clubhouse. Milwaukee's "Check Game" was heavily documented throughout the season, and it involved no single player, coach, or member of the organization believing that their success outweighed the success of the team as a whole. That kind of selfless environment is not easy to create in any group setting, but for a Major League Baseball team that relied on 55 different players throughout the season, getting everyone to buy into the same approach is nearly impossible.

Without Murphy's dedication to fostering a team-centered clubhouse and his awareness that the Brewers, even more so than other organizations, need to adopt a selfless approach, Milwaukee would not have won nearly as many games as they did during their memorable 2025 season.

However, Murphy's guidance doesn't stop at ensuring his players and coaching staff are working towards a greater goal than individual success. It instead extends to the ever-important world of confidence, a trait that carries far more weight in a sport like baseball where failure is the expectation. The Brewers have become known for taking players who were struggling in their former organizations and turning them into the productive big leaguers they knew they could be. A large reason for their aptitude in that department is Murphy's unwavering confidence in his players. The Brewers' manager constantly acknowledges the difficulty of the game and the obstacles that his players, especially the inexperienced ones, are going to face throughout a season. That awareness leads to grace, and that grace is often all players need to feel more confident in themselves.

That's not to say Murphy simply lets his players get away with silly errors and doesn't reprimand them for their mistakes. He notably pulled two of his everyday players, Sal Frelick and Caleb Durbin, from a game early in the season after each of them made uncharacteristic mistakes in the field and on the basepaths. Rather, Murphy's style of coaching involves an acknowledgement of the game’s challenges paired with an awareness that his team can't afford to make mistakes that other teams can. The combination of a selfless team and one that views mistakes as an opportunity to get better rather than a reason to lose confidence is both rare and highly successful in the game of baseball, and one that Murphy has been able to instill in his teams in each of his two seasons as the Brewers' manager.

The irony of this all is that the person who is responsible for creating this environment where individual accolades take a backseat to the team's success is the one person who came away with a major end-of-the-year award in 2025; the Brewers came up empty in both the Gold Glove and Silver Slugger Award voting processes, and Drake Baldwin beat out Durbin for NL Rookie of the Year on Monday night.

Regardless, Murphy and Brewers fans know that the Manager of the Year award is really a team award, one that recognizes the team who defied expectations in the most impressive fashion in the previous season. Therefore, while it's Murphy who is the one adding some hardware to his trophy case at the end of the year, the award is really confirmation of the Brewers' success as a whole during their memorable 2025 season.