Pat Murphy, the sometimes-cranky-sometimes-kindly grandfather figure at the helm Milwaukee Brewers, has won his third straight Manager of the Year award in his third season with the team. He is the first person ever to win three times in a row.
The Brewers have been smashing preseason expectations for several years. In 2024, Murphy’s first season at the helm, the Brewers—who’d won 92 games and the NL Central in 2023—were projected by FanGraphs to go 78-84 and finish fourth in the division. Instead,
they won 93 games and finished ten games instead of second place in the Central. In 2025, FanGraphs’ projections pegged the Brewers for 84 games and second place. Milwaukee instead led the majors with 97 wins and again handily won the division.
2026 was the cherry on top. Even after leading the majors in wins the previous year, Milwaukee was projected for 85 wins and, again, second place in the division. Instead, they blew past the franchise record with 103 wins, more than anyone else in the league, and marched to a World Series victory in dominant fashion.
That World Series, of course, has no bearing on this award, as votes were cast before the postseason. But the Brewers under Murphy have, at least to the outside world, been defined by a stubborn refusal to abide by preseason narratives, and Manager of the Year votes often go to guys whose teams most outperformed expectations. In this case, it’s a combination of factors: not only did the Brewers outperform their expected win total by anywhere from 18 to 23 games, depending on your source (which, for some perspective, could’ve turned an American League team from a 100-loss projection into a playoff team), but they were definitively and unquestionably the best team in the league. How could your vote go to anyone else?
Manager of the Year was first awarded in 1983. When Murphy won his second consecutive award last year, he became just the third manager to win twice in a row after Bobby Cox in 2004-05 and Kevin Cash in 2020-21. Murphy becomes the tenth manager to win the award three times, joining four-time winners Cox, Tony La Russa, and Buck Showalter, and three-time winners Dusty Baker, Terry Francona, Jim Leyland, Joe Maddon, Bob Melvin, and Lou Piniella. Three of those men (Cox, La Russa, Leyland) are Hall of Famers, and three more are finalists this year; Francona is the only other manager on the list who is still active, though Melvin was still managing as recently as 2025.
The other finalists in the National League were the Phillies’ Don Mattingly, who took over for the fired Rob Thomson in April when the team was just 9-19 but led them to 88 wins and a playoff spot, and Walt Weiss, who, in his first year with the Braves, improved on last year’s win total by 18 and returned them to the top of the NL East.
In the American League, the award went to the Chicago White Sox’ Will Venable. Just two years after arguably the worst regular season since the dawn of the American League in 1901, Venable led the White Sox, who’d lost at least 101 games three years in a row, to an 84-78 record, a spot in the postseason, and a series victory over the Houston Astros in the Wild Card round.
Venable’s competition was Cash, who failed to win his third Manager of the Year award despite his Rays’ wire-to-wire performance as the best team in the AL, and another manager who took over mid-season, Boston’s rookie manager Chad Tracy. Tracy oversaw the stretch in which the Red Sox went 31-5 between late June and early August, and after taking over when his team was 10-17, went 77-58 (largely on the strength of that run) over the rest of the season and earned a Wild Card berth.
