Dave Roberts and Pat Murphy are meeting again, this time with the Milwaukee Brewers and Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. Eleven years after one brief Padres assignment and one sudden handoff, they are opposing managers in October with the series on the line.
It is the kind of playoff pairing that turns a front-office decision into a story that still has a pulse. Roberts is chasing a third straight title and a fourth in seven years with Los Angeles. Murphy, who took over the San Diego Padres the day after Roberts managed one game for them on June 15, 2015, now has the Brewers in the NLCS after a season in which they won more games than at any point in their history.
The connection goes back to a chaotic stretch in San Diego. The Padres fired Bud Black, Roberts managed that one game and the club lost, then Murphy took over on June 16 after the team started 32-33. A.J. Preller had spent his first full year as general manager assembling a roster that included Matt Kemp, Justin Upton, Wil Myers, James Shields and Craig Kimbrel, but the results never matched the spending. San Diego finished 42-54 under Murphy the rest of the way and ended 18 games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers.
What happened next made the present matchup even sharper. Roberts left for Los Angeles, and Murphy went to Milwaukee to work as Craig Counsell's bench coach, where he spent eight years as a top lieutenant before taking over. He has since won three NL Central titles and is the reigning back-to-back NL Manager of the Year. The Brewers then knocked out the Padres in four games, and now Murphy is trying to steer the same club past Roberts and the Dodgers.
The odd part is that the path to this series still leaves one question hanging over the old Padres decision: why San Diego chose Murphy over Roberts and Mark Kotsay in June 2015. The answer is buried in a managerial crossroads that never really stopped mattering, because the men on opposite benches today were once part of the same emergency solution in Los Angeles. That makes this NLCS more than a matchup of heavyweights. It is the latest chapter in a choice that the Padres made 11 years later impossible to forget.
