After a second straight season in which the Milwaukee Brewers far outperformed preseason expectations, their manager, Pat Murphy, has been rewarded with the National League’s Manager of the Year award.
Former Brewer catcher Stephen Vogt won the award in the American League. Both men won this award last season.
Prior to the 2025 season, the Brewers lost significant major-league talent for the second consecutive year. Devin Williams was out the door, traded for a starting pitcher who would make two starts as a Brewer and an infielder with zero major-league games. Willy Adames was gone in free agency. Brandon Woodruff was still working his way back from an injury that cost him all of 2024. Despite a comfortable division win in 2024, most preseason projections pegged the Brewers around the middle of the league: ESPN projected the Brewers at 80-82, Keith Law of the Athletic had them at 84-78, the Ringer had them 14th in their preseason power ranking, MLB’s Mike Petriello had them in his sixth tier of preseason contenders (behind 20 other teams).
Manager of the Year tends to go to one of two types of candidates: managers of teams who blow away the competition, and managers of teams who vastly outperform expectations. Murphy won MotY in 2024 after his Brewers won the NL Central after the losses of Corbin Burnes (to trade) and Woodruff (to injury). In 2025, they not only won the Central again after the aforementioned losses of Williams and Adames, but they won a franchise-record and MLB best 97 games, four more than the 2024 team, when most thought they’d take a step back, perhaps a significant one.
That’s the sort of thing your team needs to do if you’re going to win a second straight Manager of the Year award, a feat that has only been done two previous times since the award was first given out in 1983 (Bobby Cox in 2004-05 and Kevin Cash in 2020-21). Murphy and Vogt are, unsurprisingly, the first managers to ever win Manager of the Year in each of their first two full seasons (recall that he finished the 2015 season as interim manager of the San Diego Padres).
Just to win this award more than once puts them in a bit of an elevated class. They are the 17th and 18th multiple-time winners of the MotY award, joining a group that includes six current Hall of Famers and several more who are either obvious future Hall of Famers or will certainly garner strong consideration someday.
Multiple MotY wins (* = in the Hall of Fame as a manager):
2: Sparky Anderson*, Kevin Cash, Davey Johnson, Tommy Lasorda*, Jack McKeon, Mike Scioscia, Joe Torre*, Stephen Vogt, Pat Murphy
3: Terry Francona, Dusty Baker, Jim Leyland*, Joe Maddon, Bob Melvin, Lou Piniella
4: Bobby Cox*, Tony La Russa*, Buck Showalter
The National League’s other finalists were Philadelphia’s Rob Thomson and Cincinnati’s Terry Francona, who won this award three times as the manager in Cleveland (curiously, he was never the winner in Boston despite winning two World Series there, a perfect encapsulation of how preseason expectations heavily affect the outcome of this award). Thomson’s Phillies won the NL East and finished a game behind the Brewers for the league’s best record (though their payroll was more than twice as big as Milwaukee’s). Cincinnati snuck into the NL’s last Wild Card spot with an 83-79 record after the Mets pitiful second half. It was the Reds’ first postseason appearance in a full 162-game season since 2013.
In the American League, Vogt took the award after his Guardians staged an unlikely comeback to take the AL Central from the Tigers in the last week of the season. Cleveland, despite operating with one of the worst offenses in the league (they were third-to-last in runs per game, behind only the Rockies and Pirates) and dealing with a gambling scandal that cost them their closer, managed to capitalize on Detroit’s epic collapse in September and came roaring from behind to win the division with an 88-74 record. The Tigers got revenge in the Wild Card round, though, as they took two out of three in Cleveland and eliminated the Guardians.
John Schneider’s Blue Jays won only 74 games in 2024, and while that was a supremely disappointing season in Toronto, the team’s 20-win jump in 2025 vaulted them to the top of the American League standings and, ultimately, about as close as a team can come to winning the World Series without winning it. Schneider took over the Blue Jays partway through the 2022 season.
The Seattle Mariners turned to their former catcher Dan Wilson late last season when they were mired in mediocrity. While they did not make the playoffs, Seattle went 21-13 down the stretch with Wilson at the helm, and that earned him the removal of his “interim” tag before the 2025 season. Seattle was aggressive in the transaction market this season, making big acquisitions of Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suárez to bolster their lineup. Ultimately, behind a historic season from catcher Cal Raleigh, the Mariners were able to hold off the Houston Astros for their first AL West title since 2001.
