MLB WORLD SERIES: RAYS VS BREWERS

October 24, 2026

Pat Murphy

American Family Field

Milwaukee Brewers

Pregame 2 Press Conference

Q. Ashby just keeps rolling along in this postseason and people talk about his steady heartbeat. What is it about his kind of personality that enables him not to -- to seemingly be oblivious to the pressure of this situation?

PAT MURPHY: The thing that comes to mind first is his commitment to his teammates. He's been through a lot, this kid -- major surgery on his shoulder, not everybody comes back from that. His rehabs and what he's been through, ups and downs, Minor Leagues, Big Leagues, starter, reliever, long reliever -- I mean, it's been a lot.

He's committed to his teammates, and he knows that's a responsibility on himself to continue to improve, and he's done that.

Q. Jackson Chourio again gets two hits off the first pitch. I don't know if this is remarkable to you or not. I've asked both of them separate times, and they're just like best foot forward. You have two guys who are known for this, and yet you talk a lot about, you educate us about working the at-bat, keep going. Have you ever pulled yourself back and told them you don't need to be patient, just let them fly kind of a thing?

PAT MURPHY: No, you don't dictate when a guy throws a punch, you know what I mean? There's a naturalness to it. When the balls are in the middle, there's just a naturalness -- is that a word? Adam, is that a word?

Q. You made it one.

PAT MURPHY: There's just like a natural way of conducting an at-bat. The first pitch is a good pitch to swing at, not always, but working an at-bat doesn't mean not swinging at the first pitch. It's like throwing a punch, if there's an opening, go ahead. Just to throw a punch to throw another one, sometimes sets up another one, but not always.

He has a knack for being ready, and that's what I love.

Q. When you guys are doing your prep work for the series and you look at your scouting reports and videos on Peralta, are you learning anything? You're like, you know what, he's back to the guy he was, so we pretty much have seen this all.

PAT MURPHY: Yeah, there's no question. We learn little things. We've seen that he's moved over on the mound. We see that he's got his vert back and he's got his angle back, pitching at the top of the zone.

He's not pitching today, is he?

Q. No.

PAT MURPHY: Okay. You scared me for a second there. Ask me that tomorrow or the next day.

No, we see that he's in his element, man. That's Fastball Freddy. Change-up's been great, a pitch that he really worked on here and got better. His usage is -- we wanted him to do it like this too. A lot of his successful games were very similar to what you're seeing now.

Q. You and a lot of the guys in this front office come from pretty different --

PAT MURPHY: Am I in the front office?

Q. You and the guys in the front office separately --

PAT MURPHY: I can piss him off as quick as anyone.

Q. You guys come from pretty different baseball backgrounds. You were managing in college playoff regionals before some of these guys were born. How have you bridged that gap just from a perspective dynamic? Like I'm sure that there's conflict and disagreement all the time on who's playing and where they're playing and whatever -- I can see that you're smiling. The answer's yes.

PAT MURPHY: They don't mingle in who's playing and who's not playing. They don't mingle in that.

The whole key is respect, you know. They came up in the game. Matt Arnold was a scout, so immediately I have something that I respect about that. And a lot of the other guys, Will Hudgens, he played at Notre Dame and went on and played in the Minor Leagues, so I can relate to that.

There's so many of those guys that aren't nerds, as they say. They're guys that really have a perspective on the game. Why not give them the respect and not be closed-minded to -- because I've learned so much along the way and continued to learn, why not build that respect for those people and seek to understand where they're coming from and then try to see like, wow, can that help me? Or maybe I can help them seek to understand me, what I know, even though maybe it can't be measured.

I can't tell you why Sal is just a little bit better than what anybody would rate him as. I can describe it, but you can't measure it. So you just try to work together.

Q. Was there a player, whether it was during your managerial tenure here, maybe as a bench coach, where they were maybe better than you expected and it sort of changed your willingness to accept those types of things in the game?

PAT MURPHY: No question about it. There's been players on this team where they're like really high on them, and I'm like, oh, really? I wouldn't do it that way. Now over the course of the season, I say to myself, wow, you know what, I see the value. I still might have similar beliefs about this area of his game or that area of his game, but wow.

Yeah, it's a give-and-take all the time.

Q. I remember during the NLCS when David Ortiz had said when he walked into your office, he said he walked out with just like this raging confidence just after talking to you. He said he wanted to go back --

PAT MURPHY: Who did?

Q. David Ortiz.

PAT MURPHY: Did he play for me?

Q. Not that I know of.

PAT MURPHY: Oh, when he came to -- I gotcha. He walked out with confidence?

Q. That's what he said.

PAT MURPHY: I didn't know the dude was short on confidence.

(Laughter.)

You know what I'm saying? He had a pretty good go, didn't he?

Q. He said when he and A-Rod and those guys walked out, there's something about you. There's some kind of swagger with this team and you bring it on with the players. Where does that come from?

PAT MURPHY: I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't know how to address that really, to be honest with you. I really was excited to meet those guys, to be quite honest with you. I knew Alex from way back. I knew Derek from way back. Big Papi, I knew through Pedroia, and he spoke so highly of him.

Yeah, I can't tell you what that's all about. I don't think they're correct there, but I don't know.

Q. Can you take us through the thought process of moving Yelich up to the No. 2 spot last night? I don't know if you're willing to share it yet, but are you sticking with that plan? You kind of switched on your lineup last night, what you've done. That's not an abnormal thing, but what kind of all goes into that?

PAT MURPHY: You think about who you're facing, who your best hitters are, who's going the best, who can handle this repertoire this way, where's the break in the lineup, what reliever will they bring in for that break in the lineup, how damaging is that. You don't want to limit guys on number of at-bats potentially. All that kind of stuff goes into making a lineup.

I do it on this little napkin every morning, and I send it to Ninja, and Ninja sends it to the whole deal. But it's not as complicated as you think. If you and I sat down tomorrow and we answered a few questions and I said, wow, you know, Peralta, remember he's going to try to do this, and this is how he handles this and this guy -- you know what I mean? Familiarity, the whole thing goes into play.

And you and I have a conversation, literally we'd be done in three minutes. It comes down to this or this, and then that -- you can peel that away pretty good too.

Remember the guys at the top, you want to bat the most. That's kind of how you look at it.

Q. Does that practice continue even in the World Series? It's on a napkin?

PAT MURPHY: Napkin. I'll show it to you. Oh, my phone's not here. I sent it to Ninja. Ask Ninja, he'll send you one. How many games we played? 170 games, napkin.

Q. You were telling us the Counsell story the other day about having him yell "Mine" for ground balls to pull out a little more vocalization.

PAT MURPHY: That was stupid.

(Laughter.)

Q. Is Brice Turang -- was he like that at the beginning?

PAT MURPHY: No.

Q. How does he compare in terms of quietness, confidence, and how has he evolved in that?

PAT MURPHY: I can see they're both slightly built guys -- no. Brice was a first-round pick out of high school. Yeah, he's not lacking confidence, you know what I mean? He's certainly not lacking confidence.

I don't know that Couns lacked confidence. He just didn't exude it when he walked out there, and I was looking for something, you know what I mean? I'm trying to build a program at Notre Dame. They don't have a full complement of scholarships. They don't have a lot of emphasis in the program, and they're thinking about dropping the program. I'm trying to build the program. So I need the shortstop to be a take-charge guy.

And he was so consistent in his glove work. Not super, super talented, just so consistent, and he was such a worker. I wanted him to just step out a little bit.

You can't do that to people. You've got to let people find that on their own. I was a little off.

Q. Brice exuded that from the beginning?

PAT MURPHY: Pretty much. Brice knew he was good. Why do you think I picked him for the quantum leap? Because I knew he knew.

Q. Do you typically watch replays of games when you get home at night?

PAT MURPHY: Not always when I get home at night. My kid's playing in the Mexican league, so I go watch his games because they're oftentimes starting at that time. Or he was in the Minor Leagues, I watch him in the Minor Leagues, his games, go through his at-bats if the game is already over depending on where we are, and then I come back in the morning when it's fresh. I write about the game. I make some notations, and then I'll look at things.

Q. When you looked this morning at last night's game, what did you see on the replay that you didn't notice live?

PAT MURPHY: Of the whole game?

Q. Yeah.

PAT MURPHY: Hamilton stumble, stumble, still go to third. I get it, he could have stopped at second and stole third, but you get going in the moment, I got this, I got this.

What else did I notice on the replay? Really the umpire did a great job behind the plate. There was one pitch to Sal, first pitch of his at-bat. Not sure when. He could have challenged. It was like that far a ball.

You looking for something in particular?

Q. No, just wondering what you picked up.

PAT MURPHY: What else did I notice? Uribe made pitches. A pitch he made inside to Caminero really helped set up the rest of the at-bat.

Q. How many pages of notes do you end up with?

PAT MURPHY: You don't want to know. I'm a writer. I'm a doodler. My mind is not like -- I categorize a lot, and it doesn't just flow on the same subject. It kind of goes here, and then I'm like ahh.

Q. You save them up throughout the season?

PAT MURPHY: No, I don't save them. I save my journal, but I don't save the like doodle notes, like, oh, I've got to remember to tell Mike Vassallo to never speak to me again. I don't save that.

Q. Not every man drives a great bullpen like you do. Sometimes it leads to them being ex-managers. You have such a fantastic one. The latitude it gives you to pull a starter maybe instead of sticking with them against your instincts, can you talk about that luxury?

PAT MURPHY: It's been that way all year, and it's a trend in baseball. There's less and less big-time starters that can get through the lineup three times, and you've just got to measure and feel your own players. You know your own players by now. But even early in the season, you've just got to kind of do the best you can to make decisions based on what you know you have.

When you feel like you have -- and you want to build confidence in that bullpen so they can be a great bullpen. That's a tricky act when you have a team like this who has so much contact. For instance, yesterday, Miz is going on pitch 80. How many are we going to get out of him right now? Are we going to get 90? So I've got 12 pitches yet.

Yandy has already homered off him earlier in the year. Hit two balls hard off him earlier today. Do I want to have him pitch the third time around, pitch 86, 87, get hit hard, and now he's facing Aranda, who's as good a hitter as there is out there and is going good. I'm like, eh, this is a better way to go.

That's what your bullpen gives you. It gives you that -- like you were mentioning, it gives you that opportunity to say, hey, we're good here. We've got enough to cover it. And that wasn't always the case in past years of Major League Baseball, but now everybody knows you've got 13 guys on your staff, you'd better believe in all of them.

The days of the two long relievers, like just mop up, great guys, team guys -- those guys are gone. That's how guys build their numbers. So that doesn't happen.

Q. It's not very often an organization trades a player then brings them back in a couple years like you guys did with Hamilton? What was it about him that you liked maybe the second time around, and what's allowed him to be so consistent in the postseason?

PAT MURPHY: I think it was the versatility. They love this kid. When you make trades, you have to trade good players or you're not going to make good trades, I don't think. To win a trade isn't a thing. You've got to get what you need.

I think when they traded David, they knew they were trading a good player. Then when we had the opportunity to get him back, like, hey, this guy might be a full-time player. He's got a little experience, never full-time experience, but he's got a lot of traits that fit with us, which is electric speed, there's a bat-to-ball there that's getting better, and there's a defender in there that can probably defend on seven positions on the diamond. So I think he's a great pickup.

I think he's just gaining the confidence. This kid's got a little fight in him that he doesn't exude in his personality, but he's got some real fight in him.

Q. When it comes to Logan Henderson, just from where he was at the beginning of the year, Spring Training, to where he is now, what do you think has been the biggest area of growth for him this season?

PAT MURPHY: I think his consistency, staying healthy, his belief system, his understanding, his arsenal, I think all that has come along.

Q. You had mentioned earlier about --

PAT MURPHY: Did you wear a tie yesterday?

Q. No. I didn't bring one.

PAT MURPHY: That's awesome. Let's talk about that. What are ties? What's the purpose of ties? Is it a tradition? Really, explain to me. I wore a tie in grammar school every day to school, every day to school.

And then in high school, Christian Brothers Academy, wore a tie. I cut it off right here. I wore -- you had to wear a collared shirt, I wore a gas station shirt that said Geno right here, SO and then Geno. And then my tie, it was cut off. Wore boots. They didn't like me. It's a great memory.

But what's the purpose of a tie? Like what is it?

Q. Help tie makers.

PAT MURPHY: You know what I'm saying? It's just become a -- it's kind of phasing out. You guys feel compelled. You feel like you're at a higher level when the tie goes on. You feel a little more sporty. You don't use bad language, the whole thing. I can see it.

Kurt went away from the Ken Rosenthal, huh? That was a thing too, tying a tie.

Q. I asked you earlier about Sal Frelick. You see something in him that the standard numbers won't tell you. What is it you see in him that's maybe a little better than the --

PAT MURPHY: He's just the ultimate competitor, winner. He's got the it factor. You think of Joe Montana. You think of people that have -- Larry Bird, that have the it factor. I'm not saying he's at that level of talent or has been in a position to do those things, but he has that it factor. He can take a team down the field.

I'm sure when you're a man down in hockey, I'm sure he can prevent guys from scoring. He just has that grit, he has that belief system that like I'm going to get this done, and you're not going to deny me.

It's a beautiful thing, man. It's beautiful. I don't speak to the kid. Him and I (batting fists).

Q. Are you a little worried that the Rays saw a good look at your bullpen, obviously throwing, I think, four innings, put out a lot of guys. Do you think they got a good look at them?

PAT MURPHY: They did. They did, and that is a factor. That's a factor. Every time you show them your leverage guys or every time you show them these guys, that's a factor. So that's an advantage for them going forward.