Pat Murphy's Viral Backtrack Sparks Blunt Criticism

As I’m quite certain you’re aware if you’re reading this article on FanGraphs.com, the Milwaukee Brewers just won their first World Series championship in franchise history.

They didn’t limp their way to the alcohol showers either, winning 103 games during the regular season before an 11-2 playoff run that never felt as if they were in serious jeopardy.

When you’ve already snatched up the full scholarship to an elite school, it probably doesn’t matter whether you got an A or a B in your senior year electives.

But as Mr. Barr reminded me when he gave me a D in English in my final quarter of high school, something which I managed to conceal from my mom for 20 years, there are still report cards to fill out.

Grading the manager of a team that dominated in the playoffs is always a bit tricky to pull off.

After all, whether moves were good ideas or poor ones, they mostly worked out, or the Brewers wouldn’t have dominated so consistently.

But we evaluate the process here, not just the results, and hopefully I have just the right combination of objectivity and natural unlikability to grade Brewers manager Pat Murphy fairly.

BATTING

Grade: A

As someone who likes picking apart things, I’m mildly disappointed that I don’t really have many gripes here.

The truth is, a manager in baseball does not have the same level of tactical influence over the game as, say, an NFL head coach does.

Baseball is largely a game of execution and chance, and while many decisions have an impact, there are limits, on both the good and bad sides, to just how much a manager can affect the outcome.

A lot of a manager’s job is simply getting the right players on the field, and as Casey Stengel noted, “keep[ing] the five guys who hate you away from the four guys who haven’t made up their minds.”

From an overall standpoint of getting his preferred players on the field, Murphy did a very good job.

One thing I respect a lot is how Murphy trusted his players in their roles, while also not being afraid to bench a player.

Even with Christian Yelich having a lousy season, a lot of managers likely would have had trouble leaving him, a veteran with a lot of cachet in Milwaukee who was named as the team’s first official captain in history, out of the lineup against unfavorable starting pitcher matchups.

Even more would have had trouble doing it without it causing any kind of controversy.

That’s a hard thing to do without significant buy-in from your players.

While the full report card continues with additional categories, the grade on batting decisions — and the specific handling of Christian Yelich — stands out as a defining feature of Murphy’s first championship season.

Murphy, 67, became a major league manager for the first time at 65, a late-blooming path that nearly took him to the New York Mets instead.

After the 2019 season, Murphy was a finalist for the Mets’ manager job, going through three rounds of interviews that included mock press conferences and in-game scenario testing.

“I thought 100% I was getting the job until that last meeting with the owner,” Murphy said on “The Show” podcast.

“I kind of knew they were going in a different direction.”

The Mets hired Carlos Beltran, who never managed a game before resigning amid the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal.