"I did everything wrong 5 times."

Pat Murphy did not get a real big league managing job until he was 65 years old He has won Manager of the Year twice since Here is his whole story He never played a day in the major leagues himself. He was a catcher who signed with the San Francisco Giants and spent four years in the minors without ever getting called up He was the head coach at Arizona State for fifteen seasons. He won 629 games there and took them to the College World Series four times. Before that he was at Notre Dame and won 318 more Then it ended. He resigned in the middle of an NCAA investigation, after being told to resign or be fired The NCAA found him innocent of the violations. What they actually reprimanded him for was his attitude toward their investigators. They called it cavalier Here is how he describes that stretch "I was a college coach forever, and then I had this huge injustice happen, and I thought, Why me?" And then this, about himself "My ego was involved a great deal more than it should have been." So at 51 years old he went to the minor leagues Eugene, Oregon. Tucson. El Paso. Nearly five years riding buses in the low minors after fifteen years running one of the best programs in the country San Diego gave him the interim job and he went 42 and 54 in 96 games. They did not keep him "I did everything wrong five times." So he took a job as somebody's bench coach in Milwaukee. He did that for eight years Then Craig Counsell left for Chicago, and the Brewers handed it to the 65 year old Here is what happened next. Manager of the Year. Then Manager of the Year again. 97 wins last season, 103 this one And a sweep of a Los Angeles roster built to never lose a series like this He was not some nobody they found in a parking lot. He was one of the best college coaches alive before any of this, and the Brewers handed him a roster Counsell had already built. But he was 51 when he had to start over in the low minors, and 65 before anybody gave him a team of his own for a full season. Christian Yelich said it takes a certain kind of player to play for him. It took a certain kind of man to still be waiting at 65 (Via @thesportsontap)

— Punchoutpitch (@Punchoutpitch) October 18, 2026

I was interested in that quote — "I did everything wrong 5 times" — not because I'm following the Brewers, though I am, but because — just 5 days ago — I was blogging about the positive side of wrongness.

After Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize, I started reading her book "Wrong Norma," and I wrote about her answer to the question, "Tell me about the 'wrongness' in the title of Wrong Norma." She said that in academia you always feel "that you’re wrong or on the verge of being wrong and you have to worry about that, because everything is so judgmental and hierarchical." And that's "kind of a mentality I was interested in disabling." It "loosens the mind" not to worry about being wrong: "you can go on to think other things or wider things or the things underneath where you were. It’s just suddenly a different landscape." 

Apply that to baseball.