NL CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES: DODGERS VS BREWERS

October 16, 2025

Pat Murphy

Dodger Stadium

Milwaukee Brewers

Pregame 3 Press Conference

Q. What does it mean for you guys to play loose today because of where you stand at this point because clearly right now you're laid back?

PAT MURPHY: This is just an act. I'm not laid back. I'm nervous as hell, come on.

I mean, you compete with freedom, and you've got to feel good enough about yourself and good enough about the situation to be free, to compete so your best foot can be forward. I'm just hoping our guys do that.

Everybody's uptight, everybody has that pit in their stomach. They don't want to lose. They want to play good. And we understand the process of competing. But to compete with freedom is the key. And it's hard to do. It's hard to do.

Q. Yesterday you mentioned that Blake Snell has a bigger payroll than your whole pitching staff. This series has a lot of eyes on it besides baseball's side of things. Do you have any words or opinions about a possible future salary cap on MLB?

PAT MURPHY: I don't know. Listen, I'm a baseball coach. It's what I do. I try to help players find their best self. I don't know if I'm good at it or not. But I don't know anything about the business side. I don't even think about that. That's above my pay scale. I think about helping players get better.

However a guy's getting paid, it's none of my business. The comments about, I just try to bring attention to how great our guys are for competing the way they have. It doesn't matter -- when it's one-on-one, it doesn't matter what anybody's making -- you compete and play baseball, the same way you play baseball all year.

I'm not looking to make any opinions about what's going on in baseball today, the rules.

I'll tell you this, MLB does a hell of a job, however it gets to it, when they make rule changes and do things like that, they do a hell of a job of making good changes.

So hopefully we continue to make good changes and everybody's happy and the fans can be happy with great competitive baseball.

Q. Other than his willingness to take the ball literally every game here, have you learned anything in this postseason about Ash as far as competitiveness, durability, anything like that?

PAT MURPHY: For sure. For sure. He's been quality. He wants to take the ball. It's a nice little niche, and it helps our bulk pitchers, too, that don't have that experience of the start and the anticipation and all that kind of stuff.

And it serves as a help, because, you know, for instance, a guy like Miz, who you might see today, a guy like mis went through a stretch of really struggling on the front end. And he did it, consistently struggled.

It sounds easy to just throw him out there and get him to grow up and it's great. But when you have a guy like Ash throwing every day and capable of throwing every day and his stuff doesn't go down, why not put him in there for three, four, five, six, seven hitters.

Q. You guys have the best road record of the regular season. What led to that success, and is there anything you guys can take from that into the next hopefully three games here?

PAT MURPHY: Yeah, great people. There's no -- this game is, as you know from following it, you ebb and flow. You go through great times and whatever. You could play good and lose. You can play average and win. But the type of guys we have assembled are the right type to be able to overcome things and to play -- they've played great on the road. They have played great at home.

Usually the team with the best record in baseball has a chance to have the best record on the road because that's how you get the best record in baseball. So anything different that they've done? No, they've just played the game pretty hard for nine innings, like we did the five games in Chicago, or the five games against Chicago. We played hard every single game.

The two games here, we've played hard both games. There's not a matter of like, oh, what happened to the Brewers? They're not showing up; they're not playing well at the right time.

Wait a second, we just beat the Cubs, who was one of the hottest teams in baseball at the time, in a very emotional five-game series. That's good. That's playing good.

Now we're down two games to the Dodgers who had two epic, historical pitching performances. It's the way it is. We've got a lot of baseball left.

Q. Assuming Miz is the one following Ashby, does that bump Quintana possibly to tomorrow for the requisite length that you need from someone?

PAT MURPHY: Right, yep. Great question.

Q. Would Quintana start, would you say that?

PAT MURPHY: That's a dumb question. I'm just kidding. (Laughter.) I'm just kidding.

Would Quintana start? Possibly. He's obviously not -- because he's left-handed, we don't get that advantage unless we thought that they were going to take their lineup and do it totally differently, which we don't think the Dodgers will with two of the best hitters in the game in Ohtani and Freeman. Most likely it wouldn't make as much to have an opener.

Q. Yesterday he thought he was pitching or at least he said he thought he was pitching today. How much in general are you asking your pitchers to sort of go with the flow more than they're used to? And do you consider that a significant ask, or is this life in the postseason?

PAT MURPHY: It's life in the postseason, for sure. And everybody's going to be critical of everything that doesn't go perfect, you know what I mean? They were probably critical in the Chicago series, too. But we won. So there it is.

We've been able to piece together all year kind of a winning formula. And despite the two great pitching performances and we're still in a good spot. It's either Miz today or Miz tomorrow; Quintana today or Quintana tomorrow. That's the way it is.

Q. Is it safe to say that your team likes being the underdog, is motivated by being the underdog? And when you're having those underdog-type conversations, do you ever reference payroll, your payroll, their payroll, anything about payroll that you could use to your advantage?

PAT MURPHY: To the team?

Q. Yeah, when you're having those conversations or creating that underdog mentality.

PAT MURPHY: I don't think we're creating an underdog mentality. There's not one of you out there that predicted us to win over 81 games this year, not one person. So when that happens, who are we? You know what I mean? Like, who are we?

We don't have the big name payroll, we don't have the big-name stars, although some are becoming recognizable. Brice Turang is the Platinum Glove winner last year and he's kind of put himself on the map as an up-and-coming great player.

Sal Frelick has put himself on the map where people go, this guy's special. He just has the "it" factor.

Jackson Chourio, at 21 years old, is becoming -- it's not like we don't have star power, but we don't have $700 million guys and we don't have guys with $300 million contracts.

But with all that said, we're the underdog because we are. Now, underdog meaning we're not capable? I didn't say not capable. I'm just saying we're the team that nobody predicted to win over 81 games anywhere -- last year or this year.

We won 93 last year with the same group and 97 this year. Maybe we won't be underdogs in the future. But based on the things that predict success in the Major Leagues -- you mentioned payroll, that's a correlation between great success and great payroll.

So you can bring it up if you want to, but I don't bring it up with our guys. I just try to get them to play hard and believe they can.

They win the games. I have very little to do with it. They have created for themselves, we're the team that we're going to play ya. We're going to fight ya.

Q. So payroll is never a topic in your clubhouse?

PAT MURPHY: Never. I say never, I'm sure guys talk about how much they make and don't make, how much the other guys make. But I'm not using that as a motivational thing.

Q. You have a theory particularly in recent years, seems like the visiting teams had no problems winning on the road. To some the home-field advantage isn't a big advantage. Why do you think it's happening?

PAT MURPHY: It was in Chicago. I promise you, that environment in Chicago, I still think about it. The Cubs fans should be commended. I don't necessarily have a close personal relationship with any of them. But I mean that environment was unbelievable.

And our environment was unbelievable. So I do think the home teams in that particular series had an advantage.

I don't know. I don't really think about it. I just think about 27 outs versus 27 outs. The environments are always pro the home team, and Dodger Stadium is a great venue to be part of a baseball game in.

I don't really look at it success at home or on the road. I'm just trying to figure out how we win tonight.

Q. You mentioned the epic historical games the Dodgers pitched in Milwaukee. But part of that is because they actually went into the eighth inning and went into the ninth inning, which, of course, doesn't happen much now. How do we get back to that? Because logic would say your best pitchers throwing the most pitches gives you a pretty good chance to win. And all of our innings, limits, and pitch counts haven't stopped the injuries. With your player-development background I wonder how we get there?

PAT MURPHY: It's maybe the topic in baseball today.

First of all, the two guys that went to the eighth and ninth inning are special. They were at the top of their game, in my opinion. That's special.

That's why you pay that kind of money for those guys because there's only a handful of them out there that the third time around the hitters are actually just as disadvantaged. Usually pitchers give up the advantage a little bit third time around when hitters have seen you a couple times.

A guy like Yamamoto, that didn't happen on that particular night.

It's coming, it's coming where more and more pitchers have to get through it.

But to have the talent to do it against the type of lineups that are out there today, that's another question. The whole injury situation is the mystery of baseball right now: How do we solve it?

I personally think that we should make the zone a little bit smaller, especially at the top. I think it would change the game a little bit if we move the zone down just a couple inches down just because it's impacting the offense in the game. Wouldn't have to set your sights so high and then cover the whole thing; you could set your sights a little lower.

It takes away that brain-dead heaver that's throwing 103 at the top. That pitch is hard to do anything with anyways. If you clip the box, it's a strike. It's a really disadvantage. If you made them bring it down to where your bat normally comes into zone, you've got a different thing. That's my little theory on it.

But the pitching's just getting better. The pitching is just getting better.

Q. In those two excellent outings, how much of it do you think was them being able to exploit the approach that you guys generally take, and how much of it was the hitters getting away from the things that your offense does best? And what does that mean for the adjustment tonight against Glasnow?

PAT MURPHY: I term it this way: To lay off one guy's split is way different than to lay off another guy's split. Same spot in the zone. It's four inches below. Same spot but it's thrown by -- one guy has certain properties to it. And it's thrown by Yamamoto and it has different properties to it.

So, again, you give Yamamoto a chance to throw his best game, yes, you look different than you do against pitcher Z who doesn't have the same properties on that pitch.

So it's the stuff that creates the illusion of the ball's someplace else. All of a sudden you're chasing it a little more. It's the same team. They didn't do anything different. The approach wasn't anything different. We knocked them out in the first inning the last time we faced them. We didn't all of a sudden come up with a new game plan, okay, the same hitters. That particular game, he would have beat most teams, for sure.

Our offense has been good all year long. Those two pitching performances, good pitching beats hitting most every time.

Q. Austin making some great waves after his great response, your son. Wondered what you thought of the response; sounded like a chip off the old block.

PAT MURPHY: I love my sons. My daughter and my sons are the most important thing in my life. Anytime they can be involved and learn anything, be involved in this life and the positive parts of it, I'm just really grateful and thankful.

I don't evaluate his responses or anything like that. I just think it's tremendous they can be part of it. I'm really thankful for the insight to maybe ask him a question, include him. That meant the world to me.

I didn't even know it would be broadcast. I'm hoping you're not writing down everything I say, you know what I mean? (Laughter) That could be problematic, for sure.

But just grateful. That's it. He's a great kid. We all say that about our kids, so I don't want to garner any attention for him in a way that isn't appropriate. But just grateful.

Q. Did he get a kick out of the attention he's getting?

PAT MURPHY: He's not on social media or anything like that. He's hearing it from friends and people showing him things. He's like, what was I supposed to say? I don't know. (Laughter.)).