The Brewers and Cubs are set to square off in the postseason for the first time, which means the most high-stakes reunion yet for Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy and Chicago skipper Craig Counsell. To tell the story of their friendship, we mined the archives of MLB.com for some of our favorite articles about these old friends and combined them into the following.
MILWAUKEE -- To understand what Pat Murphy means to Craig Counsell and what Counsell means to Murphy, you have to go back to a half-frozen field in South Bend, Ind., in the fall of 1989. The spindly shortstop from suburban Milwaukee had so irked his skipper with a series of errors that Murphy ordered Counsell to his position to field hotshot grounders.
One particularly hard-hit baseball took a bad hop, bounced up and broke Counsell