Pat Murphy won the National League Manager of the Year award on Tuesday, becoming the first manager ever to win it three straight years. The Milwaukee Brewers manager took the honour for a regular season that ended with a franchise-record 103 wins, and the award was announced on November 10, 2026, less than two weeks after Milwaukee won the first World Series title in club history.
MLB marked the first on X, posting that Murphy is the first person to win Manager of the Year in three consecutive seasons.
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Pat Murphy, Manager of the Year, Three Years Running
The BBWAA’s official results make the scale of the win plain. Murphy received 20 of the 30 first-place votes and 124 points, and he was the only manager named on every ballot. Atlanta’s Walt Weiss finished second with 86 points and Philadelphia’s Don Mattingly third with 25, while San Diego’s Craig Stammen took the remaining two first-place votes and finished fourth with 24. The BBWAA states the record directly: Murphy is the 10th manager to win the award three or more times and the first to do so in three consecutive seasons, since the award was first handed out in 1983.
The ballots were submitted before the postseason, on the BBWAA’s five points for first place, three for second and one for third system, so the vote judges the regular season alone. That matters for what the three-peat actually certifies. Murphy did not win because of October. He won for the 162 games that came before it, and he has now won the award in every season he has managed the Brewers.
The Season The Vote Rewarded
Milwaukee’s win totals have climbed every year under Murphy: 93 wins in 2024, 97 in 2025 and a franchise-record 103 in 2026, the most in the majors. Across those three seasons his record is 293-193, and the Brewers have won the NL Central in all three years after he stepped up from eight seasons on Craig Counsell’s staff. October then finished the story the voters never saw: Milwaukee swept the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS and beat Tampa Bay to win the World Series, the first championship in franchise history.
theScore notes that the combination puts Murphy in rare company: he is the first manager to win this award and the championship in the same season since Ozzie Guillen in 2005. The Associated Press, in its report of the announcement, adds the context that makes the run harder to explain away: the Brewers play in Major League Baseball’s smallest market, carry a payroll in the bottom half of the sport, and have still posted the best record in the big leagues in each of the past two seasons.
Murphy, who turns 68 on November 28, accepted the award from a hospital bed in Milwaukee, a day after hip replacement surgery he had deliberately scheduled for after the World Series. He deflected the honour toward his roster. “I think it is just a reflection of what our team has done,” Murphy said Tuesday night. “First and foremost is players, hungry players that are willing to live up to certain standards and have a focus and awareness about winning.”
Where Murphy Sits In The Award’s History
The list he joins is short. Only three managers have won the award four times: Bobby Cox, Tony La Russa and Buck Showalter. Murphy is the fourth manager to win it three times with the same team, after Cox with Atlanta, Dusty Baker with San Francisco and Terry Francona with Cleveland, and he remains the only Brewers manager ever to win it. His predecessor, Craig Counsell, finished second four times without winning once.
Back-to-back winners had been the ceiling for four decades. Cox won in 2004 and 2005, Kevin Cash in 2020 and 2021, and Stephen Vogt in 2024 and 2025, and each run stopped at two. Murphy’s third straight win breaks that ceiling, and it leaves him one award short of the all-time record of four, a mark he can reach next season in what would also be a fourth consecutive win, something no manager has approached.
Venable Takes The American League Award
The night carried a second historic winner. Chicago White Sox manager Will Venable won the American League award, and the BBWAA’s AL results show a much closer vote: Venable took 15 first-place votes and 111 points, ahead of Tampa Bay’s Kevin Cash on 98 and Boston’s Chad Tracy on 47. Chicago became the first team in MLB history to reach the playoffs after consecutive 100-loss seasons, going 84-78 a year after a 60-102 debut season under Venable, and he is the first White Sox manager to win the award since Guillen in 2005.
Awards week continues with the Cy Young winners announced Wednesday and the MVPs on Thursday. Murphy’s place in it is already settled. Three seasons as a manager, three division titles, a franchise wins record, a World Series, and now an award run no manager in either league had ever put together.
