he 2024 Milwaukee Brewers are beginning to take shape with the official hiring of bench coach, Pat Murphy to become the team’s next manager.
Let me begin by saying, I am in full support of Murph and will be cheering him, and the Brewers on each game day come next season.
Let me also be very honest in my assessment of this hire. Murphy will be entering his mid-60s this season, and with a team that, by recent reports, has fully embraced the upcoming rebuild, this was a hire, at the very least, to me, that was questionable, at best.
To make matters even more interesting, the Brewers also made it official in naming former second-baseman, Rickie Weeks as the team’s “Associate manager.”
All of this, Craig Counsell’s departure to Chicago, mixed in with David Stearns up, and leaving a season ago, all of this, something just feels off.
Is it the way this team has to operate? Is it the lack of spending? Is it ownership? No matter how you spin it, something is brewing in Milwaukee.
Through all of this, with the “associate” title being tossed out there, Counsell’s comments about “a new challenge,” Stearns deciding to “take time off,” and Mark Attanasio’s remarks the day Counsell left seem, again, to me, like some sort of dysfunction – some sort of differentiating opinions on the way things should be ran versus how they are being ran.
At the end of the day, there have been way too many moving parts in the last calendar years for this organization – especially for a team that has been in the playoffs five, out of the last six seasons.
Look, we can argue about semantics until we are Brewer blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is, there is a way Milwaukee operates on the business side of things, and eventually that has to change to expect different results.
