MILWAUKEE -- The cameras caught Brewers manager Pat Murphy standing in his spot at the end of the dugout during the fifth inning, shaking his head. It’s been that kind of homestand so far.
For the second straight day, Murphy took the baseball from a starting pitcher, handed it to a reliever and then watched a tie-breaking home run sail over the wall. Monday’s came from Braves slugger Matt Olson off Brewers reliever DL Hall, and it sent Milwaukee to a 7-1 loss at American Family Field as Atlanta ace Chris Sale pitched into the eighth inning to help snap his team’s seven-game losing streak.
“You know, you’re going to make decisions that don’t work out,” Murphy said at the start of the day, during a broader conversation about the job of chief decision-maker. “I remember bringing in Hoby Milner last year to face [Brett] Baty from the Mets, and he homered. I remember it with [Elvis] Peguero. I remember it with [Joel] Payamps a number of times...
“Those decisions, do they sit with me? Yeah. They hurt.”
That’s life as a manager in a tough sport. Murphy has pushed plenty of the right buttons in his year-plus as Brewers skipper – he was the 2024 NL Manager of the Year Award winner, after all – but the past two days have brought some immediately undesirable results:
- On Sunday, after starter Freddy Peralta was done after six innings and 90 pitches in a scoreless game, Murphy hastily called on reliever Rob Zastryzny for a tough left-on-right matchup against Manny Machado, who crushed a homer for the only run of a 1-0 Brewers loss.
- In the fifth inning on Monday after Ronald Acuña Jr. tied the game by taking a good, long look at his solo homer off Brewers starter Aaron Civale, and Civale found more trouble with an Austin Riley homer, Murphy made a move again. In came Hall, whose first pitch was a 93.3 mph fastball up and in to Olson, who hit it to straightaway center field for a 3-1 Atlanta lead.
“Coming out of the ‘pen you can’t be soft out of the gate, you have to go right at him,” Hall said. “I kind of eased into the first pitch and he made me pay for it.”
- Then, after Hall navigated into the eighth and gave up a two-out single to Ozzie Albies for Albies’ 1,000th career hit, Murphy called for right-hander Grant Anderson to face Braves left fielder Eli White, who hit a two-run homer to make it 5-1.
Flashback to the afternoon, and a discussion about decisions. The regrettable ones are what stick with a manager, Murphy said, but he is also aware that a manager also makes plenty of good decisions in the course of a season that don’t stand out, even though they make a difference.
“You do things every day and it doesn’t get noticed, you know what I mean?” he said. “And I don’t look at them as ‘good’ decisions, they’re just decisions. If they work out, you’re like, ‘That worked, whew.’ When you lose one-run games – it feels like we’ve lost a lot of them, but I guess we’ve won just as many. I guess that means we’re in every game.”
The Brewers were in Monday’s game until the eighth but couldn’t get anything going against Sale outside of the third inning, when Joey Ortiz doubled and scored on William Contreras’ two-out single. Sale completed seven innings for the third time in his last five starts and set a season high with 11 strikeouts while holding the Brewers to that lone run on five hits.
Both of the reigning Cy Young Award winners now have a win at American Family Field this season. Detroit’s Tarik Skubal picked up his on April 14 in a 9-1 Tigers win before Sale won by his own wide margin on Monday.
It was just the kind of performance needed for the Braves, who were 0-for-the month of June coming into the night. The last five of their seven straight losses came by a one-run margin.
“He’s the right dude, man,” Murphy said. “The fact that he came back out at 99 pitches tells you a lot. He was with his team right there, you know? He was thinking, ‘You know what? We’ve lost seven in a row, we have a great team, I’m going to kick it in.’ I’m just impressed with him.”
The Brewers have hit a skid of their own, losers of three of the first four games on this homestand after winning nine of their previous 10 games. They have scored one total run and collected one extra-base hit over the three losses.