Pat Murphy’s third straight Manager of the Year award was announced Tuesday night, and he is the first person to ever win it three years running. The Brewers did not need a narrow call from the voters to get him there. They won the NL Central by 14 games, which MLB Trade Rumors called the most convincing runaway division win in either league.
Three years at the helm for the @Brewers, three years as the NL Manager of the Year for Pat Murphy! 🥞 pic.twitter.com/id02kGyb1P
— MLB (@MLB) November 11, 2026
That margin is the number Pittsburgh should be staring at this winter.
A 14-game margin is the rebuild scoreboard
Pittsburgh can feel good about progress, and fans have earned some patience. But progress only tells you the Pirates beat their own recent past, which is a low bar to clear and a comfortable one to celebrate. The Brewers are the other bar, and it sits in the same division, on the same schedule.
Milwaukee won an MLB-best 103 games, three clear of every other club. Then the Brewers went 11-2 through the Padres, Dodgers and Rays, and in Game 5 they beat Tampa Bay 4-1 for the first World Series title in franchise history. Milwaukee cleared the field in October.
The way they got there matters less than the distance they put on everyone else. The roster was built to produce runs without power: the Brewers hit among the fewest home runs in baseball and still scored enough to win the whole thing. Add run prevention that MLB Trade Rumors called one of the best in the league, and you get a club with no soft spot to hide. We already walked through the Brewers blueprint here. This one is about the finish line, not the map.
Pat Murphy: the first in MLB history to win three straight Manager of the Year Awards 🏆🏆🏆 pic.twitter.com/ORpLasehJO
— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) November 11, 2026
Pittsburgh’s offseason gets judged against the gap
Here is how I’d grade the Pirates’ winter. Forget whether they added a name fans like. Ask whether any move shrinks a 14-game hole, because that hole is the version of “contender” that counts in the NL Central right now. Milwaukee is the champion, its manager is now a historic one, and the division the Pirates are being asked to win belongs to them until someone takes it.
A fan base that waited this long deserves more than a pat on the back. The offseason plan we laid out was a start, and the front office can call it progress as long as the next step is aimed at Milwaukee instead of at last year’s standings.
That is the test for the Pirates’ 2027 offseason and every move in it. A middling free agent fills a roster spot. A move that makes the Pirates look like they could take a division series off a Murphy team is a different thing entirely. Pittsburgh has one more winter to find out which kind of team it is.
