When they both won Manager of the Year for the first time in 2024, Pat Murphy and Stephen Vogt talked about showing up to the annual baseball writers’ dinner in New York to receive the awards in costume.
The two knew each other from Vogt’s two-year stint as a player in Milwaukee, where Murphy was then the bench coach. At first, Murphy, now the Brewers’ manager, proposed he dress up as King Jaffe Joffer from “Coming to America,” and Vogt, the Cleveland Guardians‘ skipper, suggested he would sprinkle rose petals as they ascended the dais. They scratched that idea and pivoted to the blue-and-orange tuxedos from “Dumb and Dumber.” Eventually, they agreed that it was probably best to just play it straight.
“You’ve probably got 10 more of these,” Murphy told Vogt. “This will be my last one.”
That prediction took all of one year to join the dustbin of cold takes. This year, Murphy and Vogt became just the second managers in each league to win the award in back-to-back seasons. And not only were they once again heralded for their work helping turn small-market teams into division winners, but both were also believed to be on contracts that would expire following the 2026 season.
Vogt, in fact, is not a lame duck. He signed a new multiyear contract with the Guardians following the 2024 season that was never made public, sources told ESPN. Murphy’s contract, in the meantime, is set to expire after the 2026 season, putting the Brewers into a similar position to where they were in 2023, when Craig Counsell’s deal ran out and he left Milwaukee to join the Chicago Cubs for $40 million over five years.
Managerial salaries have long lagged behind their coaching counterparts in the NFL and NBA. Counsell’s $8 million-per-year salary is exceeded by only Dave Roberts’ $8.1 million with the Los Angeles Dodgers, a figure that is less than half of the annual sum Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid ($20 million) and Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr ($17.5 million) make as the top-paid coaches in their respective leagues. Among the nine managers hired in the deluge of changes this winter, multiple new hires, sources said, are making closer to $1 million.
The role of manager has evolved over the past three decades, with decision-making power over personnel shifting definitively to front offices, and yet of the dozen playoff teams in 2025, half were led by managers whose salaries rank among the game’s highest, including Roberts, Counsell, Alex Cora of the Boston Red Sox, Terry Francona of the Cincinnati Reds, Aaron Boone of the New York Yankees and A.J. Hinch of the Detroit Tigers.
The Brewers won more games than any team in baseball this season before getting swept in the National League Championship Series by the Dodgers, the eventual World Series champion. At the helm was Murphy, who has won the NL Central title in each of his two seasons and told ESPN that he hopes to remain in Milwaukee for the long term.
“I’m lucky to have a major league job. I really am,” Murphy said. “I owe a lot to the Milwaukee Brewers. I really do. I hope they want me.”
The hiring of Murphy following Counsell’s departure went against the trend of younger managers in the latest cycle. Now 67, Murphy spent most of his career as a college coach at Arizona State and Notre Dame before joining the San Diego Padres organization in 2010 and spending five seasons as a minor league manager. Following the 2015 season, he joined Counsell — whom he had coached at Notre Dame — as Milwaukee’s bench coach.
Over the next eight years, Murphy served as a close adviser during one of the best stretches in Brewers history. With a biting sense of humor and deep reservoir of baseball knowledge, he ingratiated himself enough that the Brewers handed the reins to Murphy — and have not lost a step since he took over.
“I’ve learned to trust the players. I’ve learned to trust the staff. I’ve learned to trust the front office,” Murphy said. “It ain’t about me. That’s something that I’m so lucky that I’ve discovered late in this thing. If you take yourself out of it and focus on what’s best for everybody, then you’ll tend to collaborate. Then you’ll tend to be more flexible, more open-minded. And that’s just what I’ve adopted.”
Modern managers oversee far more than in-game decision-making. They’re typically an extension of a team’s front office, ensuring that organizational priorities are implemented at the big league level. With ever-growing coaching staffs, always-tenuous clubhouse dynamics and constantly shifting rosters, they are far from the playbook-following functionaries they’re often pegged as in an era increasingly defined by analytics.
Murphy is an amalgamation of old and new schools, fluent in the metrics that matter and still teeming with personality. He is quick to brand people with nicknames, whether it’s Brewers players and front office members or even media members. He walks around during games with what he called “pocket pancakes,” which are exactly what they sound like: pancakes he stores in his pocket and retrieves for a midgame snack.
His tenure as Brewers manager almost didn’t happen. In 2022, he considered returning to the college game.
“I made the right decision,” Murphy said. “I found a home. If I do it 10 more years, you know, I’d like to do it in Milwaukee.”
