Sean Kirst: In Pat Murphy's baseball triumph, old friends revel in a childhood dream that never died

Bob Campese remembers how he and Pat Murphy used to celebrate. When they were 11 or 12, they both played for an Eastwood Little League team called Wayne’s Bike. They won a lot of games over the three or four years they played together, and a lot of times — still in uniform — they ended the day by going to Frank’s Pizza on North Avenue.

When they first joined Little League, somewhere around fourth grade, a little single-serve pizza at Frank’s cost 50 cents, Campese said. By the time they reached the “majors” in Eastwood, when Wayne’s Bike was routinely one of the best teams in Eastwood, the cost had climbed to an entire dollar.

It was worth it. Winning was nice, Campese said, but the real treasure was in the everyday ritual of doing something together they both cared deeply about. From dawn until bedtime, baseball was their passion — and the best part of it was getting together each morning to do it all again with your best friends.

For most of us, you let that go once you get older — though you wish for those moments again for the rest of your life. Impossibly, beautifully, Campese was brought back to the feeling Wednesday night as he watched an entirely different level of celebration at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, just after Milwaukee finished off Tampa Bay in the fifth game of the World Series.

Campese was in the stands with a few friends from greater Syracuse — Dave Venditti, Mike Vavonese and Mike Meola Jr. — as Murphy summited baseball’s Everest, managing the Brewers to the first World Series championship in franchise history and the first for Milwaukee since Henry Aaron and the old Milwaukee Braves won it all, in 1957.

Campese and Murphy are both inductees into the Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame, an honor built on their high achievements as both athletes and coaches. Venditti, now of Florida, goes back with them to the baseball cradle: He, too, was on the same Little League team in Eastwood.

Atlanta, 2022, l to r: Steve Barber, Pat Murphy, Bob Campese, Danny Ridgeway. Credit: Courtesy Bob Campese

Venditti’s dad played some baseball in the Army while stationed in Korea, then came home to coach his son and many young buddies on a team called Wayne’s Bike, sponsored by Venditti’s uncle. As for Meola, he is an assistant baseball coach at Le Moyne College, one of Murphy’s stops along an improbable you-can’t-make-this-up baseball odyssey, while Vavonese – now a prominent Syracuse lawyer – was a football teammate of Murphy’s at Christian Brothers Academy.

“I went to Tampa to support a very loyal friend who’s never forgotten where he’s from,” Vavonese said.

He and Murphy met as 8-year-olds, playing Pop Warner football with the Eastwood Bears. Vavonese said he still texts with Murphy throughout the baseball season. He remembers, when Murphy was coaching baseball at Notre Dame, how Vavonese and another friend, Tony Lenkiewicz, that traveled to the campus on the day of an epic Notre Dame-Penn State football showdown in 1988. Murphy found a way to let his buddies make a stop on the field, to be in the middle of it all.

The point, to Vavonese, is the same one made by all these old-school Syracuse guys who went far out of their way to be at the decisive World Series games against the Tampa Bay Rays. None of them would have blamed Murphy – his life built around navigating baseball’s highest levels – if he had dropped out of touch with friends who haven’t been at the center of his life since when he was a kid.

Instead, in the way of so many of us in our 60s and 70s with old friends who have moved far away, he will pause amid daily life to fire off a text…

Even if he is in the middle of figuring out, say, how to beat a Dodgers team trying to win its third straight world title.

Campese and Venditti, who now lives in Georgia, were in Tampa for all three of the Rays’ home World Series games. Longtime friends Mike Lorini and Steve Barber, both CBA graduates, were with them at the beginning and then they had to leave, while Meola and Vavonese flew down Wednesday, hoping to witness exactly what they experienced:

Syracuse buddies celebrate how old friend Pat Murphy manage the Milwaukee Brewers to a world championship – l to r, Mike Meola Jr.,, Dave Vindetti, Bob Campese, Mike Vavonese. Credit: Courtesy Mike Vavonese

A guy they love, at the pinnacle, being interviewed by famed baseball analyst Tom Verducci.

“Just amazing,” Vavonese said.

The stadium was a sea of blue and yellow, the Brewer colors, so many people traveling down from that Wisconsin industrial city that Milwaukee players said afterward said the Tampa games almost felt like playing at home.

“You realize just how much these people love baseball and love their town,” Vavonese said, a civic culture that matches perfectly with Murphy, who expressed his appreciation for the way he was shaped by Syracuse in 2024, when he came home for the local sports hall of fame induction dinner.

Tuesday night’s Milwaukee loss was especially excruciating to Murphy’s friends. With a 3-0 series advantage and needing just one more game to clinch, the Brewers fell 4-3 to Tampa Bay after taking a 3-2 lead into the bottom of the 12^th. No team has ever come back from three games down to win the World Series, but every Milwaukee fan knew what you did not want to say out loud:

If the Rays pulled within 3-2, anything was possible.

In decisive fashion Wednesday, by playing that relentless and suffocating brand of baseball that encapsulates the mindset of their manager, the Brewers made sure such a comeback was not going to happen.

The power of that victory touched off a sense of wonder in Mark Reid, who watched the games from Syracuse – but who played with Murphy on several Eastwood all-star teams, five decades ago, at different points in Little League.

“Just incredible to think we were all out there playing together,” Reid said.

They were kids at a specific and sort of last-gasp moment within the Baby Boom, many of them among the younger children of parents shared by the Great Depression, World War II and the Korean War. As Campese remembers, he would get up early on summer mornings, leap on his bike and pedal madly to Eastwood’s Nichols Field, now called Cummings Field. He would meet Murphy and enough good friends to put together daily sandlot games of baseball.

They would play for hours, head home for lunch and then hustle right back, baseball gloves hanging from the handlebars of their bikes. In late afternoon it was home again for dinner – Campese’s dad, a toolmaker, was often just out of work – and back to Nichols in the evening to either play an official game for Wayne’s Bike, or to watch whichever other teams were playing.

Bob Campese couldn’t find an old Little League photo, but he found this: Eastwood Bears, 1971. In the upper right: He’s number 12, right next to Pat Murphy, his longtime friend, number 84.

Campese was a public school kid, who graduated from Henninger High. Murphy went to Catholic schools, including CBA. But a lifetime friendship was created in the sheer neighborhood joy of those pickup days, which turned into a wistful sense of please-give-me-that-feeling-just-one-more-time-again that many of us, of similar age and experience, understand exactly.

Venditti’s dad was the coach. Murphy was a fierce and indomitable pitcher. Venditti recalls how the only complaint Murphy ever had was the classic gripe of every 12-year-old pitcher of that era: The coach said no swimming on game days, not matter how hot it was. Murphy insisted he could do it and still be strong as ever.

Since the guy became legendary on every level of youth baseball for lasting forever on the mound in extra inning games – a wildly different planet from the pitch counts used today to protect young arms – Venditti kind of figures, yeah, Murphy probably would have been OK to take a dip.

Still, going back to Reid’s main point: Every one of those Eastwood kids, from the day they went out for Little League – in an era when so many kids wanted to play that coaches actually had to make cuts – carried the same exquisite, almost-no-chance dream. You played ball all day behind a secret fantasy that eventually you would make the majors, and you watched World Series games on black and white TVs, games played in the deep shadows of autumn afternoons, and told yourself that someday…

Those World Series giants that you watched: A Brooks Robinson. A Roberto Clemente. A Bob Gibson.

Maybe, just maybe, that could be you.

For most kids, the vision was lost to hard reality by the time you took your first high school class. Some might take that burning goal a little farther, excelling throughout high school and even into college. Eventually, as Reid said, a point arrives for almost everyone where “you give up the dream.”

Murphy didn’t. Ever. He kept pushing at every stop, whether it was coaching at Claremont-Mudd-Scripps or Arizona State, and the extraordinary thing was that Wednesday night he finally achieved baseball’s greatest managing feat at 67, an age when many classmates had long retired.

That means he is old enough to remember that golden era of summer days and grownup-free baseball in Eastwood, and his team today exemplifies the ethic his friends remember so well, from childhood:

The Brewers, said Campese, “all fight for each other.”

Steve Barber, who now lives in Atlanta, became close to Murphy at CBA and roomed with him briefly in college at Bowling Green. They stayed in touch over the years, and Barber said the quality he finds most compelling about Murphy is simply deep loyalty and decency.

Before Tuesday’s game, for instance, the little group from Syracuse threaded their way through the stands, down toward the seats just above the diamond. Murphy – at that moment, busy preparing for the game in the absolute epicenter of global world baseball – looked up from the field and acknowledged them.

Before Tuesday’s Brewers-Rays game: Steve Barber, Bob Campese, Dave Venditti, Mike Lorini. Credit: Courtesy Bob Campese

In meeting their eyes, in that moment of connection between childhood pickup friends and a World Series manager, was the shared realization:

Here we are.

“He still treats us like the old days,” said Barber, a truth Campese and Vendetti both embrace. They were shaped by a childhood in which baseball was everything, when they spent all day playing pickup on a neighborhood diamond, where they had big league fantasies that every kid at some point has to let go.

Supposedly. But what they can tell you today is this: If one of them actually pulled it off, then maybe they all did.

“Sometimes we pinch ourselves,” said Campese, who wishes he and Pat could go to Frank’s, chew on some pizza, relive this whole World Series…

And in the morning, at Nichols Field, pick up teams and play again.

Sean Kirst: In Pat Murphy’s baseball triumph, old friends revel in a childhood dream that never died

Read more of Central Current’s coverage