Milwaukee’s championship celebration came with a little extra edge aimed at the Yankees.
Right after the Brewers wrapped up a 4-1 win over the Tampa Bay Rays in Wednesday night’s Game 5 at Tropicana Field to claim their first World Series title, manager Pat Murphy was caught on camera with Jake Bauers and fired off a shot at his former club.
“Remember when you were on that (expletive) Yankee team,” Murphy told Bauers. “Everyone playing for themselves. Just remember!“
Bauers spent part of the 2023 season with a Yankees club that finished 82-80 and missed the playoffs. The left-handed slugger then moved to Milwaukee after the 2023 season in a trade for two minor-league outfielders, and he turned in a career year in 2026, batting .266 with 26 homers, 86 RBI and an .874 OPS.
His postseason bat cooled off, as he hit just .191 in 13 games, but he still earned NLCS MVP honors after going .286 with one homer and six RBI in Milwaukee’s four-game sweep of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Bauers, 31, is set to hit free agency this winter.
The Yankees have been taking shots from all angles since Oct. 7, when they were swept out of the playoffs by the Rays in the American League Division Series. Murphy’s remark arrived one day after former Yankees catcher Jorge Posada said on the New York Post podcast that he “doesn’t feel welcome” around the team, “even in spring training.”
Posada won five World Series rings in a 17-year Yankees career from 1995 to 2011. His comments came after Derek Jeter, CC Sabathia, Alex Rodriguez, Paul O’Neill and Joe Girardi all criticized the Yankees’ clubhouse culture, fundamentals and appearance policy.
Jeter, Posada, Sabathia and Rodriguez were all part of the Yankees’ last World Series team in 2009. Girardi was the manager, and O’Neill won four titles with New York from 1996 to 2000.
Some of that criticism had already been brushed aside last week by owner Hal Steinbrenner, general manager Brian Cashman and manager Aaron Boone in Zoom interviews.
O’Neill told NJ.com columnist Bob Klapisch that he liked how the Rays played and said the Yankees had drifted away from fundamentals. He also pointed to the old rules about hair and beards and said the club no longer had the same uniform look or the same pride in the Yankees tradition.
Jeter, speaking on FOX after the Rays swept the Yankees in the ALDS, said the old Yankees teams handled the small stuff and did not beat themselves the way this group did.
Rodriguez was even blunter on The Herd with Colin Cowherd, saying, “You don’t see that fear there anymore. People go into Yankee Stadium, they beat us, and then they make fun of us.”
On FOX after the sweep, Rodriguez said there needed to be a philosophy change, not necessarily a personnel overhaul, and argued that the organization needed people who understood both sides of the ball. He said the same movie had been playing for more than a decade.
Girardi, on the New York Post podcast The Show, pointed to the baserunning mistakes and players sliding over bases, saying, “Somebody’s got to say something, enough is enough … There are things that happen where you wonder, ‘Is someone saying anything?’
Sabathia, on uptownsportstv, said no one was left in the clubhouse to uphold the old standard. He said that when he arrived, veterans like Ron Guidry, Reggie Jackson, Mickey Rivers and Willie Randolph helped set the tone, and he added that those kinds of figures need to be around the clubhouse and in Tampa for spring training.
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