'Offense, in My Mind, is a Mindset': How Pat Murphy is Preparing Brewers Offense for Sustained Success

The entire position-player corps departed the Brewers clubhouse in Maryvale early on Friday morning, for a meeting that lasted a full hour. It was a meeting about run production, but the team's trio of hitting coaches barely spoke. The subject wasn't hitting, manager Pat Murphy clarified. It was offense.

"Offense, in my mind, is a mindset," the two-time National League Manager of the Year told reporters in his daily media session. The meeting set key expectations for the year ahead, in everything from mentality in the batter's box and hustle out of it to emotional regulation when things don't go the batter's way.

Murphy led the convocation, but said several hitters weighed in and helped new players get a sense of how the team succeeds on offense. In turn, several of the new faces in the room—including Reese McGuire, David Hamilton and Luis Rengifo—offered an opposing team's viewpoint on how the Brewers operate.

One of the small ways that a lineup can produce more than its component parts would lead you to expect: controlling the pace of the batter-pitcher encounter.

"That's a great concept that, I mean, now you're delving into the parts of the game that I love, you know," Murphy said. "We only have so much control of the game in general, right? You can say pitchers have control. It's more apparent that they do, but how does the hitter gain control? And one of the things you're talking about, the pace, you know, and keeping it on your own pace. Now, granted, [the pitcher] has the ball. He's gonna throw it what he wants to, but the pitch clock has helped the hitters, in my mind. You know, okay, now I got this long to get it done, so I know I'm getting a pitch here. But what do I do the first few seconds to keep myself in rhythm, on pace, in control as much as I can?"

That was a specialty for the Crew in 2025, when they sometimes seemed to force opponents to work at a speed that increased the likelihood of mistakes—be those grooved pitches from a rushed pitcher or errors by overwhelmed defenders. Murphy called the objective "creating chaos," and McGuire and others mentioned that feeling in the aforementioned meeting.

Only Cardinals batters had a shorter average time between pitches with the bases empty than did the Brewers last season. Only the White Sox and Nationals (each of whom spent lots of their seasons playing either blowout games or meaningless contests against other teams going nowhere) had a higher percentage of their pitches categorized by Statcast as having come Fast, in terms of time elapsed since the previous pitch. Milwaukee batters pressed the issue, and it worked like a charm.

There's no shortage of technical hitting instruction taking place. Two hours after the meeting broke up, the Brewers were out in the cage on the field at American Family Fields of Phoenix, with exuberantly profane new hitting coach Dan Vogelbach shouting encouragement when they achieved "the right path" and falling ominously silent when they failed to get off the swing they'd just talked about. For this team to recapture the magic it's often had over the last two years, though, it will need to do more well offensively than just prepare and hone their swings. If that wasn't already clear to them when Friday began, it is now.