Manager makes postgame pressers personal

Sports journalists, like their mainstream counterparts, often struggle for respect while they’re simply trying to do their jobs. But walk into a Milwaukee Brewers postgame press conference and you’ll see their manager kindly ask reporters’ names and where they’re from.

I came across a Front Office Sports clip showing Brewer’s skipper Pat Murphy doing that, and my immediate thought was connection = good PR. I wanted to know more, so I went to longtime Brewers beat reporter Todd Rosiak and asked if this was just a postseason thing and if he’d seen it. It turns out, it’s Murphy’s thing year-round.

“Every single game.”

“Murph always starts by looking in the audience to see if he recognizes everyone, and if he doesn’t, he immediately asks them to introduce themselves and say where they’re from,” said Rosiak, a 30-plus-year veteran of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sports staff.

You know when someone hears you’re from XYZ City and asks, “By chance, do you know …?” — and you actually do?

One reporter learned that he and Murphy live five minutes apart. Who doesn’t love finding common ground when you least expect it? Again, connection — it’s public relations gold.

“He’s done this going back to when he was interim manager of the Padres in 2015,” Rosiak said. “I think people get scared or nervous sometimes, and some think he’s joking, but everyone goes along with it, and he makes it fun.”

Sports are big business. I’ve worked with plenty of organizations that act like the world will end if every interaction isn’t like a stodgy HR meeting. I don’t know about you, but I’ll choose the ones that remind us why we’re in the room, even if it’s to notch a good-guy check on their reputation report card. From what I can tell, this is just “Murph being Murph.”

Journalists are at the ballpark to do a job, but Murphy treats them like you know — people. That connection might just make the next story they file, too.

MORE👇🏼

⚾️ Speaking of baseball, we scored a few MLB-related PR hits for Mequon, Wisconsin-based Form & Fitness that connect with a training tool Brewers pitcher Jacob Misiorowski uses. (I’m a Tidal Tank evangelist, so this was a fun one to pitch — click on the links to see two of them.)

The cool thing about stories like this? There are angles yet untouched, thanks to a gym manager I’m training to recognize what news looks like.

LITTLE MORE👇🏼

🏀 The NIL Edge — As we head into the 2025-26 basketball seasons, a quick NIL-for-good story, courtesy of the Kansas Jayhawks.

ONE MORE👇🏼

📰 Per last week’s SIDEbar, when I called out my college alma mater [thanks for your comments], I worked with Kathy and Jamie Miller to make noise so the coach who choked and slapped their son/brother (and lied about it) didn’t make it into the University of South Florida Athletic Hall of Fame. Best we can tell, people listened.

Remember — most communications crises happen because cover-ups are⛽️ gas cans just waiting to explode. In this case, it was a committee that ignored a coach’s rage-filled history and nominators who tried to inflate one crisis by adding their own.

THAT’S A WRAP

©2025 Gail Sideman, gpublicity.com, SIDEbar

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