The final out of the World Series ended up in Jake Bauers’ glove, but the keepsake that mattered most wound up in Pat Murphy’s hands.
After Bauers secured the championship-clinching catch, he handed the ball to his manager, and Murphy answered the moment with a blunt jab at the Yankees.
"You're gonna be a rich fer," Murphy told Bauers. "Just remember when you're on that horse s Yankee team and you're all playing for yourselves...just remember this is way we used to do it."
The exchange fit the tone of Milwaukee’s title run: a smaller-payroll club that rode chemistry, buy-in, and a close-knit roster all the way to a World Series championship. Murphy had a talented group, but the defining trait of this team might have been how tightly it stayed together.
Bauers catching the last out only deepened the story. It was the end point of years of build-up to that exact moment, and the manager-player celebration that followed had its own edge.
Murphy’s Yankees remark can be read a couple different ways. Bauers is headed for free agency this offseason and is unlikely to return to Milwaukee, so Murphy may have been using the Yankees as a stand-in for whichever team signs him next.
There’s also the New York connection baked into Bauers’ path. He spent 2023 with the Yankees, finishing off parts of two seasons in the organization, which gives Murphy’s dig another possible layer. That Yankees team was also coming off New York’s worst season in three decades, so Bauers’ memories from that stop may not have been especially warm.
Whatever Murphy meant, the message landed in the middle of a celebration built around Milwaukee doing things its own way.
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