Murphy was right about EVERYTHING

[edfunderburk]

No doubt, I’ve been a critic of Murph’s “in game decision making” numerous times this year & last year. I’m man enough to admit - I was wrong about Murphy & I celebrate his success. I’m glad we have him as our manager. It’s fun to see him have a “later in life” MLB success story. I hope it ends (or continues) with a World Series championship in 2025. 

I’ve complimented him on his intangibles - team chemistry, winsome personality, etc. But upon further review - Murphy knows baseball far better than I do (& likely better than anyone else in this forum). The players love him & play well for him. The media enjoys his tongue-in-cheek sarcasm & playful banter. His personality is larger than life. He is the exact opposite of Craig Coun$ell - who is dry as toast. 

Regardless of how the Cubs series or the season ends - Murphy has been remarkable. He takes chances other managers likely would not take … & it works for this young team. He has the “it factor” & his team wins in part because of their skipper who gets the best out of these Average Joes. Murph is deserving of another Manager of the Year award. 

Hip Hip Hooray for Brewers Manager Pat Murphy! 

[adambr2]

The move to go to Miz yesterday for multiple innings, in a tie game at first, blew me away. I thought it was insanely risky. It took some serious stones to make that move because it would have been second guessed like you wouldn’t believe if it had backfired and we were sitting at 1-1 today. Gotta tip my cap.

[shanedog19]

Season ain't over yet. He has plenty of time to make a critical managing error that will lead you to change your opinion.

[markedman5]

7 minutes ago, adambr2 said:

The move to go to Miz yesterday for multiple innings, in a tie game at first, blew me away. I thought it was insanely risky. It took some serious stones to make that move because it would have been second guessed like you wouldn’t believe if it had backfired and we were sitting at 1-1 today. Gotta tip my cap.

I still think it was insanely risky……..but it worked. 
 

I like the opener strategy with Ashby and it didn’t work……..🤷‍♂️

You make your best decision and live with the results…….that’s all you can do as a manager. 

[Thurston Fluff]

I might be giving him too much credit for this but I think essentially going with a bullpen day was in part because he wanted to keep Priester for Wrigley. The best option against a homer hitting team in an environment that can be homer friendly is a ground ball pitcher.  

[owbc]

These type of ideas likely have the buy in of a dozen or more senior people that are directly involved with game strategy. Murphy certainly has a seat at that table but the unique part is that he's the one that has to sell it to the players involved. 

Almost every team has an analytics department and surely many of them are coming up with interesting strategies, but few organizations have the buy in that the Brewers do to actually execute a high risk/high reward strategy in a series that they already have the upper hand in. Nobody in their right mind would use their clear #2 starter as a decoy in game 2 of a playoff series, while filling his space with the literal human manifestation of Ricky 'Wild Thing' Vaughn. So even though the strategy was a success we're still debating it. 

[TURBO]

We are debating it because it could have gone sideways in several different ways, and I think we are fortunate that in the end, it worked.

Fact is, it only went sideways once, and upon correcting the Ashby start with Miz and the rest of the gang, it worked.

I was strongly against the opener, and at that time, I figured it was the opener followed by Priester scenario that most of thought was happening.

Man, the entire situation took stones, and luckily, it all worked out in the end.  Took a LOT of moving parts for that to happen, but it did, and here we sit with a 2 game lead, only needing to win one more of the next three!

What a freaking season!

[LouisEly]

3 hours ago, adambr2 said:

The move to go to Miz yesterday for multiple innings, in a tie game at first, blew me away. I thought it was insanely risky. It took some serious stones to make that move because it would have been second guessed like you wouldn’t believe if it had backfired and we were sitting at 1-1 today. Gotta tip my cap.

I wasn't surprised.  If he was on the roster, I think there was a plan to pitch him and you want him pitching at home.  A young rookie pitcher who can be a bit wild needs to be set up for success, and the best way to do that is to pitch him at home where he has the crowd behind him and not against him.  Pitching on the road... probably best to leave that to the veterans.  Rookies can easily melt down in that environment.  They had a backup plan in Chad Patrick if Miz wasn't sharp.

Made a ton of sense to use a well-rested bullpen at home and then save their ground-ball starter for Wrigley where he can mitigate the winds as well as the crowd reaction from home runs.

[pitchleague]

4 hours ago, LouisEly said:

I wasn't surprised.  If he was on the roster, I think there was a plan to pitch him and you want him pitching at home.  A young rookie pitcher who can be a bit wild needs to be set up for success, and the best way to do that is to pitch him at home where he has the crowd behind him and not against him.  Pitching on the road... probably best to leave that to the veterans.  Rookies can easily melt down in that environment.  They had a backup plan in Chad Patrick if Miz wasn't sharp.

Made a ton of sense to use a well-rested bullpen at home and then save their ground-ball starter for Wrigley where he can mitigate the winds as well as the crowd reaction from home runs.

Well said, and precisely the exact reason I predicted the use of Miz before the game started.

[RobertCrawley]

8 hours ago, shanedog19 said:

Season ain't over yet. He has plenty of time to make a critical managing error that will lead you to change your opinion.

Let's say he does. He's still had a heckuva year.

[Jim French Stepstool]

6 hours ago, LouisEly said:

 

Made a ton of sense to use a well-rested bullpen at home and then save their ground-ball starter for Wrigley where he can mitigate the winds as well as the crowd reaction from home runs.

Let's not forget the crowd reaction from medium-to-deep fly ball outs, too. Although it's much easier to mitigate those.

[Jim French Stepstool]

21 hours ago, TURBO said:

We are debating it because it could have gone sideways in several different ways, and I think we are fortunate that in the end, it worked.

Fact is, it only went sideways once, and upon correcting the Ashby start with Miz and the rest of the gang, it worked.

I was strongly against the opener, and at that time, I figured it was the opener followed by Priester scenario that most of thought was happening.

Man, the entire situation took stones, and luckily, it all worked out in the end.  Took a LOT of moving parts for that to happen, but it did, and here we sit with a 2 game lead, only needing to win one more of the next three!

What a freaking season!

For my money, the three run first was more the fault of Ashby dropping the ball in the Tucker AB, than a failed strategy by Murphy. Walking the LHH caused Ashby to have little to no margin in the Suzuki AB.

So now, it appears that we come out of that game not only with Priester (and Quintana if needed) still in the holster, but a more solid & resolute Misiorowski moving forward. Great stuff.

[SeaBass]

14 hours ago, TURBO said:

We are debating it because it could have gone sideways in several different ways, and I think we are fortunate that in the end, it worked.

I like that when people say, "could have" it means it didn't.

[gregmag]

8 hours ago, Jim French Stepstool said:

So now, it appears that we come out of that game not only with Priester (and Quintana if needed) still in the holster, but a more solid & resolute Misiorowski moving forward. Great stuff.

I was thinking about this too with Miz. In a small but important way, that was a player development moment.  People often say player development goes out the window in high-leverage games, most obviously the playoffs. But a team like the Brewers always has to be thinking about what’s next. I’m not saying you put Miz in there if you don’t believe it’s a viable strategy for winning the game. But when Murphy put him in, I’m sure part of the calculation was the benefit of testing him in a tough situation and increasing his confidence.
 

If that sounds rash, remember that player development isn’t just about the medium- or long-range future. It’s also about the short-range future. When you have a lot of young players, you’re watching them develop in real time. If Miz is just a little bit better-developed player in, say, game two of the LCS than he was the day before yesterday, that could be huge very quickly.

[Team Canada]

I've been thinking about that the last couple days as well. In general, I would say we tend to view decisions from a risk averse perspective. Playoffs are a different animal of course because the stakes are much higher, but even in the regular season, we tend not to take the long view. From a manager's perspective though, it's not only about winning the game, it's developing the players on your team. I imagine there are times where the manager is thinking "boy, I have no idea if this guy can actually do this or not," but they also know that you have to put the player in the situation to find out, and the very act of doing that is what allows the player to succeed. It's much easier to nitpick from the sidelines than be the actual leader making the decisions.

[Playing Catch]

33 minutes ago, Team Canada said:

From a manager's perspective though, it's not only about winning the game

Just to tangent... I've been considering some of the second-guessing about manager decisions across baseball, and I also think that what is sometimes lost with the current zeitgeist obsessed with winning every playoff game, is that the game isn't as important as winning the series, or for that matter the World Series. I think the Ashby-Miz combo the other day, giving Priester (and by extension the bullpen), with more rest is an example of this. There are also oodles of examples of exhausted starters pitching poorly on short, or even normal rest, and I think the Brewers really want their "true" starters to get as much rest as possible between starts at this stage of the season.

I guess my overarching point is that I think that managers and front offices believe that they will need to have moments of good fortune along their journey, and want to minimize opportunities for BAD luck happening. Therefore, they believe they will need to make some risky, and perhaps unconventional, decisions, in order to win the World Series.

[RobertCrawley]

Poor Greg.

[markedman5]

Murphy using Ashby for multiple innings in a non elimination game down 3 runs doesn’t seem smart when we will need him again on Saturday.

Bullpen game coming to try and save the season.

 

[adambr2]

I guess we should have waited for one more win before firing up this thread because Murphy has looked anything but smart since Game 2.

[Team Canada]

I would've left Miz off the roster after the Reds game. Murph was right.

[treego14]

[Cool Hand Lucroy]

If I'm post-mortem-ing the Dodgers series, the real question lineup wise is just whether you maybe wanted to get Danny Jansen's bat in the lineup. Hoskins wasn't going to be on the roster, and I think it's hindsight to ask for that.

It's probably hindsight to ask for Jansen too. But you acquired that guy to hit home runs, and he didn't get a single AB. Especially against Snell in Game 1, you might have been better off sitting Frelick or Yelich, and giving Jansen 2 shots to hit.

[Jopal78]

1 hour ago, Cool Hand Lucroy said:

If I'm post-mortem-ing the Dodgers series, the real question lineup wise is just whether you maybe wanted to get Danny Jansen's bat in the lineup. Hoskins wasn't going to be on the roster, and I think it's hindsight to ask for that.

It's probably hindsight to ask for Jansen too. But you acquired that guy to hit home runs, and he didn't get a single AB. Especially against Snell in Game 1, you might have been better off sitting Frelick or Yelich, and giving Jansen 2 shots to hit.

Back up catchers don’t play much if at all in the playoffs, they’re basically there to avoid catastrophe if the starting catcher must leave the game; that rules out pinch hitting them except in extreme desperation scenarios.

Milwaukee seemingly had either Bauers or Vaughn pinch hit late in games when they were desperate. Hard to say Jansen who hadn’t played much with the Brewers (only 25 out of 54 games after being acquired) would have been more likely to deliver a miracle. 

 

 

 

 

 

[AKCheesehead]

Murph needed to get a Fathead of one of the Dodgers' SO- perhaps Mariana Vicente (Kike Hernandez) or Chelsea Freeman- in a bathing suit.  Keep it in the locker room, but cover it with four pieces of cardboard, removing one piece after each Brewers win in the NLCS.  But he didn't, so we lost.  

[RWeeksFan23]

On 10/20/2025 at 9:36 AM, Cool Hand Lucroy said:

If I'm post-mortem-ing the Dodgers series, the real question lineup wise is just whether you maybe wanted to get Danny Jansen's bat in the lineup. Hoskins wasn't going to be on the roster, and I think it's hindsight to ask for that.

It's probably hindsight to ask for Jansen too. But you acquired that guy to hit home runs, and he didn't get a single AB. Especially against Snell in Game 1, you might have been better off sitting Frelick or Yelich, and giving Jansen 2 shots to hit.

starting Jansen against the lefty snell would have absolutely been the correct call, and I would have thought so not even in hindsight.

Unfortunately it's just not a Murphy-like thing to do.