Pat Murphy Manager of the Year third consecutive award Milwaukee Brewers, Digi Mart USA News: Pat Murphy, the sometimes-cranky, sometimes-kindly grandfather figure at the helm of the Milwaukee Brewers, has won his third straight Manager of the Year award in his third season with the team. He is the first person ever to win three times in a row.
The Brewers have been smashing preseason expectations for several years. In 2024, Murphy’s first season in charge, the Brewers, who had won 92 games and the NL Central in 2023, were projected by FanGraphs to go 78-84 and finish fourth in the division.
Instead, they won 93 games and finished 10 games ahead of second place in the Central.
In 2025, FanGraphs’ projections pegged the Brewers for 84 wins and second place. Milwaukee instead led the majors with 97 wins and again handily won the division.
The 2026 season was the cherry on top. Even after leading the majors in wins the previous year, Milwaukee was projected for 85 wins and, again, second place in the division.
Instead, they blew past the franchise record with 103 wins, more than anyone else in the league, and marched to a World Series victory in dominant fashion.
That World Series, of course, has no bearing on this award, as votes were cast before the postseason. But the Brewers under Murphy have, at least to the outside world, been defined by a stubborn refusal to abide by preseason narratives, and Manager of the Year votes often go to managers whose teams most outperformed expectations.
In this case, the Brewers outperformed their expected win total by anywhere from 18 to 23 games, depending on the source, and were definitively the best team in the league.
Manager of the Year was first awarded in 1983. When Murphy won his second consecutive award last year, he became just the third manager to win twice in a row, after Bobby Cox in 2004-05 and Kevin Cash in 2020-21.
Murphy becomes the 10th manager to win the award three times, joining four-time winners Cox, Tony La Russa, and Buck Showalter, and three-time winners Dusty Baker, Terry Francona, Jim Leyland, Joe Maddon, Bob Melvin, and Lou Piniella.
Three of those men (Cox, La Russa, Leyland) are Hall of Famers, and three more are finalists this year. Francona is the only other manager on the list who is still active, though Melvin was still managing as recently as 2025.
The other National League finalists were the Phillies’ Don Mattingly, who took over for the fired Rob Thomson in April when the team was 9-19 but led them to 88 wins and a playoff spot, and Walt Weiss, who, in his first year with the Braves, improved on the previous year’s win total by 18 and returned them to the top of the NL East.
In the American League, the award went to the Chicago White Sox’s Will Venable. Two years after one of the worst regular seasons in the history of the American League, Venable led the White Sox, who had lost at least 101 games three years in a row, to an 84-78 record, a postseason spot, and a series victory over the Houston Astros in the Wild Card round.
Venable’s competition included Cash, who failed to win a third Manager of the Year award despite the Rays’ wire-to-wire performance as the best team in the AL, and Boston’s rookie manager Chad Tracy. Tracy oversaw a stretch in which the Red Sox went 31-5 between late June and early August.
After taking over when his team was 10-17, he went 77-58 over the rest of the season, largely on the strength of that run, and earned a Wild Card berth.
