Pat Murphy was back running the Milwaukee Brewers on Friday night, one day after a 2 1/2-hour back surgery in Appleton. He was not in his usual spot in the home dugout when the Brewers opened a three-game series against the Chicago Cubs at American Family Field, but he was there managing anyway.
That alone made this a rare night in the series opener. Murphy said Friday afternoon that he felt great after surgery and that doctors had cleaned out a ruptured disc. He also said the advice was to take several days off, but the whole point of doing the procedure on the off day was that he might still be able to manage the next day.
Murphy had been dealing with considerable pain in recent weeks because of separate back and hip issues. A hip replacement that had been planned for the all-star break was pushed to the end of the season, leaving the back surgery as the immediate fix. For one night, that fix was enough to keep him in the job while the Milwaukee Brewers tried to get through a division series with their manager still on the clock.
He said he would manage from a safer distance for at least the next few games, with Chris Hook handling all the pitching changes. Murphy added that he would take it easy for a couple of days and then be back in a more normal way, though he also made clear that he did not plan to change much about how he works. “I’m still not going to be doing anything different than I had been doing,” he said.
The friction is obvious. Murphy had just come out of surgery and was told to rest, but he stayed in the dugout because he believed he could. Jared Koenig, who was reinstated from the injured list before the game, put it more bluntly when he described Murphy as stubborn and said he had gone to ask whether he was all right. Murphy, Koenig said, answered, “Oh, I’m fine. Don’t worry.”
What comes next is less dramatic but more important for the Brewers: Murphy is expected to keep working from a safer distance for now, even if he is already acting like he never left. The question is not whether he will keep managing. It is how long he can do it before he returns to his usual spot without having to think about the next surgery waiting behind this one.
