Survive enough days, make enough reasonable decisions, care enough, and one of those days you begin to see yourself in your children’s eyes. If you’re very lucky at the end of all that, you’ll like what you see. Or maybe not hate it entirely.

Pat Murphy is 55. He’s survived his share of days, many of which he is proud of, some of which he’d maybe take another shot at, given the opportunity. He’s cared plenty.

He has a daughter and a son. And these are those days.

Five years ago, Murphy resigned as baseball coach at Arizona State, after 15 seasons and 629 wins. There was drama. A lot of drama. Before that, he won 318 games in seven seasons at Notre Dame.

When he was no longer a college coach, he took employment with the San Diego Padres, managed two seasons in the Northwest League and the last two in the Pacific Coast League. He’s still winning. He’s still making good ballplayers better ones. He is big-league manager material, though nobody’s talking about that yet.

View photos Pat Murphy sits in the San Diego Padres' clubhouse in September 2013. (Getty) More

The man on the other end of the phone line would rather talk about his girl Keli, who’s 28 and teaches yoga to the ladies at the Women’s Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh, who is kind and giving. And Kai, his 14-year-old, an old soul and a ballplayer himself. It’s been just Pat and Kai for years now – in Tempe, Ariz., and Eugene, Ore., and Tucson, Ariz., and El Paso, Texas – and big ol’ Pat, all shoulders and block chin and ball coach, has a little something catch in his throat when he’s talking about Kai.

“He thinks I can do anything, I guess,” Pat said, his voice thinning. “Our times together, my relationship with Kai, yeah … it’s hard to talk about. I just want him to get the pieces of me, the perspective of, ‘It’s what you give that matters. Not just aimlessly giving. The true giving.’ I think he has that. And I think he just wants me to be dad. He loves wherever we are. How about that?”

Maybe he’s thinking of Keli and Kai when he’s asked what he wants, now that he’s 55 and he sees himself in their eyes, now that he’s chased all those wins and gotten so many of them, now that he can’t be sure what’s next.

“I guess you aspire to be wise someday,” he said. “I’d like to be wise.”

Then he laughed, mostly to himself.

“The truth is, man, I screwed up as much as I got it right,” he said. “Sometimes you can only fight to a draw. But you still feel good about the fight.”

Pat Murphy is under contract for another season, which perhaps means another year with Triple-A El Paso. It’s hard to say, really. The Padres have a new general manager and that usually means change, sometimes because change is required and sometimes because there are new ideas to tend to, or debts to pay.

Murphy loves his job. And while college coaches and professional coaches generally, for some reason, stay in their lanes, Murphy never much cared for lanes. Coaching ball is coaching ball. Building trust is building trust. Leading is leading. A win’s a win. Hell, those are lanes.

Only the cars in the parking lot change.

So along comes Murphy, whose reputation at ASU was on the blustery, rigid, unapologetically ferocious side, into a game in which the authority is a signing bonus, a list of prospects and the vision of a young man five or six years down the line. The wins are more subtle. Maybe, for Murphy, subtle was going to take some getting used to. Maybe, subtle was where he was headed anyway.

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