A decade after it ended, Pat Murphy reflects on his ASU career

The gargling, repetitive whining of Pat Murphy’s blender was still humming when he picked up the phone early Tuesday morning. Perhaps some time years ago, Murphy’s shake-maker would have sounded like soothing white noise in the hustle-and-bustle of Tempe construction and aggravated early-morning commuters.

But his days in the city are through. He’s a suburban father now, hunkering down during quarantine at his home in far east Mesa. While some Valley of the Sun residents naively believe anyone on the east side of the Loop-202 freeway must be a recluse, Murphy loves it. “It’s kind of a hidden gem,” he said.

The school system is great. The families have been wonderful. The suburban serenity is a welcome change. And, of course, there’s the view. His home sits at about 2,500 feet in elevation, and as he describes some of the sights -- a high-up vantage point to see Camelback Mountain, the downtown Phoenix skyline visible in the distance -- it’s tough not to picture him drinking his morning coffee and looking out at a postcard.

Years ago, before Murphy moved, there were no clear days. Murphy’s eyes were once like scuffed-up glass, his sight, his head was a haze.

“I was stunned. I’m not embarrassed to say it. I kind of took a standing eight count. I kind of knelt down and said, ‘Ok, how do we do this?’” Murphy, now the Milwaukee Brewers’ bench coach, said. “It took me a while. It took me about three or four years to get out of that fog.”

It all started on the morning of November 20, 2009. Murphy sat down in then-Arizona State Athletic Director Lisa Love’s office. He walked in as the Sun Devil baseball coach. He left unemployed. Shell-shocked, he didn’t speak a word during the meeting. It just didn’t make sense. Sure, there were some things he wished he had done differently; there were conversations that could have been more even-keeled. But, still, it shouldn’t have cost him his job, he thought.

He drove to his son’s elementary school and pulled Kai Murphy out of class early.

“I just said, “Daddy isn’t going to coach at ASU anymore,” Murphy said he told Kai.

Murphy’s then-9-year old son balled. Arizona State baseball had been the Murphy’s sanctuary, their identity for the last decade and a half. Whoosh. It was gone.

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There was a time when Murphy thought his tenure in Tempe was going to end unexpectedly. Not in 2009, and not by anyone else's control. It was 2001 when the University of Hawaii came to Murphy with a contract offer "that would have financially tripled what I was making at ASU." to lead the Rainbow Warriors baseball team back to prominence.

A few months earlier, Hawaii hired Murphy as a consultant to the program, without pay, a sounding board for ideas and opinions on how to best run a modern college baseball program. His philosophy garnered so much respect and admiration; the Rainbow Warriors felt like having Murphy's advisor role was like having Steven Spielberg look at your movie. Good start. But why not just pay Spielberg to direct the whole thing?

Murphy would, of course, pass on Hawaii's offer to make him the head coach with a nice salary bump. But, through all his considerations, there was a whole lot more than money that tugged at him to start anew in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Being the head coach of the ASU baseball program isn't a job for the faint of heart. Or losers. Or those afraid of failure or abhor criticism. Just ask Tracy Smith. The current ASU head coach endured two of the worst seasons in program history in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Then he helped rocket the Sun Devils up to No. 3 in the country the following year and had ASU on a path for Omaha and the College World Series before the COVID-19 pandemic halted the season.

Regardless, Smith will always have his haters, his Twitter critics who think he's a million notches below the great ASU coaches such as Bobby Winkles, Jim Brock, and, yes, Pat Murphy.

The irony in that is striking because a hefty majority of those same fans wanted Murphy run out of town around the turn of the century, citing that he had only made the College World Series once and followed it up by missing the tournament altogether. Brock or Winkles wouldn't have let that happen, they argued.

"Murphy has gone through a living hell since he arrived on the Tempe campus just months before the 1995 season," former Arizona Republic reporter Pedro Gomez wrote in 2001. "There's the Jim Brock faction, which has never warmed to Murphy from the start. They are living in the past, some going so far, and tell him which uniforms he can and cannot use.

"Then there's the Bobby Winkles (Brock's predecessor as ASU baseball coach) faction, which has mostly been good to Murphy, with the exception of the fringe who still seem to be living in 1965."

Yet, Murphy came into the ASU job with his eyes wide open. He didn't leave his dream job at Notre Dame to land at a destination where expectations were low, where there wasn't a yearning passion for winning national championships. And with that level of expectations comes the inevitable heap of Monday morning quarterbacks.

"I knew coming in the expectations were so unique," Murphy said. "No draft excuse. No other excuses. I think there's a learning curve, and we don't get to say how long it is.

"That's part of the job. When you take the job, unless you go to the College World Series, and even then, you're going to have your naysayers, because there's a lot of people watching a storied program."

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It was probably around 2005 or so when the Bobby Winkles and Jim Brock factions of ASU fans morphed into one big Pat Murphy conglomerate.

Despite losing future MLB All-Stars Ian Kinsler, Andre Either and Dustin Pedroia in the previous two drafts, Murphy’s 2005 squad won 42 games, made ASU’s first College World Series since 1998 and started arguably one of the most dominant and consistent five-year stretches in recent college baseball memory.

Behind a roster littered with future first-round draft picks like Mike Leake, Ike Davis, and Brett Wallace, the Sun Devils won 228 games over the next half-decade and earned a spot in Omaha three times (‘05, ‘07 and ‘09). But to Murphy, those are just stats, numbers that are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

Rather than dwelling on what he could have done to win more games -- to stay in Omaha longer -- he reflects on how it could have better-impacted everyone who ever played for him.

“I could have paid more attention to certain kids. I could have treated certain kids with more love, with less intensity,” Murphy said. “I see articles, and they’re like, ‘Oh, Pat Murphy developed major league All-Stars,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s really gross.’

“I didn’t develop those major-league All-Stars. Those guys are major-league All-Stars, and I happened to be a part of their baseball career.”

Brandon Magee was one of the many who never made the majors. He played football and baseball at Arizona State from 2009-2012, balancing a two-sport career collegiately and professionally. But because football held priority, Magee hardly had any at-bats during his college tenure. Regardless, his admiration for Murphy is grand.

“Pat Murphy, the dude was probably my favorite coach of all time,” Magee said. “That dude was legit. I love that guy.”

And Murphy still holds great relationships with most of his former players, especially those who he can chat with before big-league games, like when Pedroia’s Red Sox play Murphy’s Brewers. He even still jokes with some of his former ASU commits -- guys like C.C. Sabathia, Jon Lester, Jimmy Rollins, and Nolan Arenado -- who still carved out some pretty solid careers without a pit-stop in Tempe.

And that’s the other tough thing about coaching at ASU. You have to recruit kids that are good, but not too good. You want them to be able to start right away but not at the level where they’re going to get drafted straight into the majors out of high school.

“It’s tricky,” he admitted.

And so, Murphy recruited high-schoolers who were more “baseball-skilled than toolsy.” He racked in guys like Pedroia and Kole Calhoun and Ike Davis, prospects that knew how to effectively play the game without relying solely on uncanny speed or Barry Bonds-like power at the plate.

It quickly paid off. Murphy fielded teams that could beat you 100 different ways; ball clubs made up of relentless competitors that would inch past you during a one-run pitching duel, then clobber you 12-0 the next night. They were winners. ASU was a winner.

In the 21st-century, Murphy never missed an NCAA Tournament. He was a phenomenal coach who kept the torch of Arizona State as a college baseball dynasty burning bright. Some people think of Murphy only for that. Others can’t get over how it all came to a screeching halt.

“I’d be lying if (I said) someone didn’t walk up to me most times I’m out and say, ‘Hey man, go Sun Devils,’” Murphy said. “It’s a nice feeling.”

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Even if you’re someone who wholeheartedly believed former ASU A.D. Lisa Love was just in her decision to get rid of Murphy, the timing was a bit odd. November 20? No spark plug? No straw to break the camel’s back? Heck, the season was less than three months away, most thought, why now?

But the fuel came the day prior -- November 19 -- when the NCAA had informed ASU of possible rules violations. In swift fashion, Love cut the head of the snake.

But even then, Love initially stated that she had accepted Murphy’s letter of resignation and went as far to say that Murphy’s dismissal was not related to the two-year ongoing investigation into the Arizona State baseball program.

"It's an amicable parting dictated by Pat," Love said in an interview that day.

A month later, the Arizona Republic reported that Murphy did not resign on his own. In essence, Love told him to resign or he would be terminated.

“Now, 10 years later, everybody is still trying to figure out what did they do? What are the violations?” Murphy said. “‘Well, there are recruiting violations.’ No, no, no. ‘Well, they were paying players.’ No, no, no. Well, there was academic fraud. No, never.

“So, there was no cheating, no dishonesty, what happened? A lot of what happened is I didn’t handle it right when the NCAA came in. I should have had a lawyer with NCAA experience and not popped off and told the NCAA investigator, ‘Look, you don’t understand, you’ve never been to a baseball game.’ And that’s not all I told them. I was not appropriate in my reaction because I was so tired of it.”

An internal investigation by the Indianapolis-based law firm Ice Miller in 2007 brought back little evidence of cheating. But there were still the allegations that Murphy and his staff had committed recruiting violations and paid players. In the NCAA’s eyes that’s quite egregious. Break it down, though, and it’s a lot simpler, a lot more innocent. He made too many recruiting phone calls and didn’t keep track of the hours his baseball players worked during his annual charity camp.

“It was Love’s responsibility to make sure her coaches follow the letter of the law, and in Murphy’s case, she failed,” Scott Bordow wrote in an East Valley Tribune column in December 2009. “Should Love have known about the alleged 500 impermissible recruiting calls over five years? Probably not. But the reported violations also include Murphy’s nonprofit Sandlot Baseball, a program in which he paid players to teach kids the fundamentals of baseball.

“It was no secret that money was changing hands — other ASU coaches had their kids in the program — so it was incumbent upon Love and other athletic department officials to know how every dollar was being spent.”

Added Murphy: “I never dreamed it would be a problem. Losing my job (because of it)? Not even close. I was absolutely stunned ... I just knew that nothing we reported in our program rose to the level of dismissal.”

The NCAA brought about two major violations related to overpaying his players for work at his Sandlot Baseball camps and allowing his managers to perform tasks they weren't allowed to. The damages put ASU on probation and kept the Sun Devils out of the 2012 postseason. On top of all that, in the final report, the NCAA hit ASU with the dreaded lack-of-institutional-control tag and deemed Murphy had a “cavalier attitude” toward regulations.

“I didn’t handle it well,” Murphy said. “But I will continue to say that there wasn’t any dishonesty or cheating involved and the rules that were broken by the program, most of them aren’t rules anymore.”

The firing then led to the fog.

Murphy took a few months to regroup, as both a person and a father. Then he jumped back into baseball. The San Diego Padres’ hired him as their Special Assistant to Baseball Operations in 2010. He managed in Single-A for two years before the Padres promoted him to head their Triple-A affiliate.

He spent a few months as San Diego’s interim manager before Craig Counsell -- the Milwaukee Brewers’ manager who played under Murphy at Notre Dame -- hired his former skipper to be his bench coach.

And, perhaps, that’s the way it should be in the cycle of coaching. The mentor guides the prodigy and, years later, the prodigy offers a hand to the mentor. Above everything else, Pat Murphy was always great to his players. And, so, when the dust swept up and the fog crept in, his players returned the favor.