‘Super competitors': How Murphy-Counsell friendship has changed

This story was excerpted from Adam McCalvy’s Brewers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

MILWAUKEE -- Quintin Berry’s best friend in baseball is former Orioles star Adam Jones, and Berry remembers as clear as day the first time he stepped to the plate in Baltimore and tried to get Jones’ attention in center field. Berry wanted to acknowledge his friend.

“He refused,” said Berry, the former Brewers first-base coach who now coaches third for the Cubs. “Later he was just like, ‘Don’t ever do that when we’re competing.’ Right then, I said, ‘OK. You’re right.’ That friendship stuff will be there after. When we’re playing, it’s time to get it. I love that.”

So it is for Brewers manager Pat Murphy and Cubs manager Craig Counsell, who are meeting again as rivals this weekend as their teams tangle for the first time in 2025.

By now, the novelty has worn off for the old Notre Dame coach and his onetime pupil, who reunited in Milwaukee from 2016-23 with Counsell as manager and Murphy his bench coach. Now that they are heading into a second season as rivals, Murphy the reigning NL Manager of the Year Award winner and Counsell currently atop the NL Central, it’s more business as usual.

The bond is still there. Counsell refers to their relationship as a “baseball conversation” that spans more than three decades. The conversations, though, are less frequent now.

“I’m sure,” Murphy said, “that all of you have great friends in the world, people that you’ve been associated with for many, many years in different ways. Maybe the relationship changed a little bit. Maybe you lived in the same town and now you don’t. But with really, really true friends, you don’t have to call them every day and say, ‘What happened last night? What did she say? What did he say?’ Craig and I will be close forever, you know? I respect him. I love him, I love his family.

“I know people would love for us to get in a fight and go back and forth between the Cubs and us, and have fights and all that stuff. Maybe that will happen, I don’t know. But we will always still be friends.”

There have been times that the Cubs-Brewers rivalry bordered on bad blood. Remember when then-Cubs catcher Willson Contreras was convinced that Milwaukee’s pitchers were hitting him on purpose?

“We had bad blood back then,” Murphy said. “And it will happen again. That’s part of it. It’s an emotional thing. It's competition. You’ve probably done that with your friend, where you’re competing and you get pissed at him about something.”

Not to be overlooked in their evolving relationship, Counsell said, is the simple matter of proximity. The two men spent nearly every day together from February to October for years.

Now they’re about 90 miles apart. And Major League managers, if you haven’t noticed, have a time-consuming job.

“It’s changed in that we’re competitors instead of teammates,” Counsell said. “I think during competitive times, it's different. It stays the same when we’re off game times. We’re friends.”

Recently, the Brewers have had the competitive upper hand, winning four of the past six season series between the teams with one even split. That includes the Brewers’ 15-4 record against the Cubs in 2021, when Milwaukee won the first of three division titles in the past four seasons.

Murphy was recognized for his role in the ‘24 Brewers’ success when he was named NL Manager of the Year, an award that eluded Counsell during his Milwaukee tenure.

“I’m happy for his success,” Counsell said. “That’s first and foremost.”

The Cubs look formidable so far in 2025, entering this series atop the NL in runs scored and stolen bases. That makes this a significant early test for the Brewers, who went into the series with a .500 record, having absorbed an unusually high dose of injuries to starting pitchers and having just navigated the longest road trip of the season.

“Of course, there’s more weight in [this series] emotionally. It’s going to be an opportunity to control ourselves and play right in big situations,” Murphy said. “They’re a great club. They went out this offseason and shored up the areas they felt they needed to. … I watch a lot of their games because it behooves me to know their team well. They’re really good.”

For these three days, the old friends will see each other up close.

“I think their relationship is great. They’re just super competitors,” Berry said. “They want to win, and they’re both very detail-oriented people. It’s like, they want to see who’s going to have the best detail covered. Knowing both of them, it’s pretty cool. You know they love each other.”