LOS ANGELES – It’s become a Spring Training tradition for old friends Andrew Friedman and Matt Arnold, who go back to the mid-2000s as young executives with the plucky Rays. Every March, they meet for dinner at The Gladly in the Biltmore neighborhood of Phoenix.
And they always invite a third: Brewers manager Pat Murphy.
“Obviously those are two great baseball minds,” Murphy said. “I think they just want me there to laugh at me.”
Just as plausible is that Friedman, 48, and Arnold, 46, have been friends so long, they’ve run out of things to talk about.
“We go back a long way and we’ve been through a lot,” Arnold said.
“I’ve known Matt Arnold for a long time. I think what him and his team have done is incredible – not surprising,” Friedman said. “The attention to detail, the way the roster fits together, it’s really impressive.”
Long before Friedman’s Dodgers and Arnold’s Brewers met again in this National League Championship Series – the Dodgers lead the series, 2-0, going into Thursday’s Game 3 – they honed their philosophies in the Rays’ offices at Tropicana Field. Arnold recalls early mornings in the office, sitting around a big table sipping coffee with a group of eager executives that included Friedman, Eric Neander, Chaim Bloom, James Click and Arnold, all of whom would one day “grow up” to run their own baseball operations department.
Then, they were all finding their way.
“We had a Nintendo in the office. It was that kind of place,” Arnold said. “It was kind of the kids running the asylum a little bit.”
When Arnold arrived after the 2005 season, Friedman, 28 at the time, had just been promoted to executive vice president of baseball operations and GM. He’d replaced Chuck LaMar, a classic baseball man with a long history in scouting and player development who’d been assistant GM of the perennial NL East-champion Braves when the Rays – or the Devil Rays, as they were originally known – hired him as their first GM. After a losing record in each of the new franchise’s first eight seasons, however, it was time for a change to Friedman, a Tulane graduate who worked in finance before breaking into baseball with Tampa Bay.
Arnold learned one thing early on about working for Friedman: You’d better be prepared.
“Andrew was very hard on us. He would shred you if you weren’t ready to go,” Arnold said. “But he was also your friend, you know what I mean? It was like, if you’re not ready, he’s going to carve you up. But if you bring your A game, it’s going to be a great conversation.
“I loved that we all had very different perspectives in the room. He was able to bring us together and help us make good decisions. And he made a ton of them.”
They made them together. Friedman made sure Arnold got some credit for that.
“He’s a great evaluator. He was in the middle of a lot of things that we did and had success with the Rays,” Friedman said. “Incredibly hard working, curious. Just watching him continue to grow and develop has been fun to watch.”
Their jobs today are the same – build a roster to compete for a playoff berth and, ultimately, win the World Series. And yet the jobs are different in so many ways, most notably the resources available to each man. Six players – Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Freddie Freeman and Tyler Glasnow (who will start Game 3 for L.A.) – each have a contract commitment from the Dodgers that exceed the Brewers’ entire player payroll in 2025.
And yet the Brewers under Arnold, the reigning MLB Executive of the Year and a veteran of Milwaukee’s front office since he came from Tampa Bay to be David Stearns’ assistant GM following the 2015 season, have hung in there. Since emerging from a mini-rebuild for the start of 2017, Milwaukee has won the fourth-most regular-season games in the Majors (763), trailing only the Dodgers (853), Astros (806) and Yankees (788).
It was with Tampa Bay that both Arnold and Friedman experimented with the different methods of building winning teams. It took them to a World Series in 2008.
“We were able to run the Rays like an Etch A Sketch, a little bit,” Arnold said. “You could shake it up and say, ‘Let’s try this.’ We were the Devil Rays, you know what I mean? It was like, ‘We haven’t been very good, so let’s try something new.
“There’s always a blessing and a curse, right? Obviously, our payrolls were very, very low. But we had the opportunity to be super creative and try off-the-wall stuff. There were no bad ideas.”
There was a freedom to it, Arnold has said many times. And in some ways, there is a freedom to the process in Milwaukee, though the Brewers’ success has pushed expectations higher and higher.
In Los Angeles, the expectations every year are exactly the same: Win the World Series or bust. Friedman’s rosters have accomplished that twice in the past five years, the shortened 2020 season and again in 2024.
“I think knowing who you are and what you need to do to have success – it’s different for every market,” Friedman said. “But staying true to who you are, having a group that works really well together, I think collaboration throughout departments is critical because you have to do it in a less conventional way.
“I used to give this analogy when I was with the Rays. If you think about [being a] doctor, we were able to be knee specialists and know every single thing about the knee. We didn’t have to worry about any other part of the body. And I came to the Dodgers, and it was, like, ‘Oh my God, I have to learn everything about the body.’ And so in different situations, it’s knowing who you are, what your advantages are and attacking that.”
That’s one of the things Friedman respects about what his friend has done in Milwaukee.
“I think they’ve done that exceptionally well,” Friedman said.
Arnold said he has adopted Friedman’s habit of getting the men and women of his front office around a table to talk baseball whenever possible – face to face. As anyone who works for a big, complex corporation can relate to, that’s not always common these days.
“I don’t want us to be friends and coworkers over email,” Arnold said.
Face to face always worked best in Tampa Bay.
“I still think about that every day,” Arnold said. “We’re a mix of all the people who work here, and I love that.”
