The Nationals won the game. Before going even one sentence further, let’s establish that as a basic, indisputable fact of the matter, that on Sept. 12, across 10 innings at Nationals Park, they scored six runs and the Angels scored five.
Yet when Blake Butera got home, it didn’t feel that way. Or, more specifically, it didn’t feel how he wanted it to or thought it should. In his first year as the Nats’ manager, he’d learned a lot of things. How to tell a player he was being pulled for a pinch hitter. How to cut up his workout shirts to avoid even the faint possibility of bacon collar. He had not, however, learned that when your relievers can’t get outs, there’s only so much a manager can do from the dugout.
So even after his team beat the Angels that Saturday, he stewed. His bullpen had blown another late lead before the offense bailed it out in extras. He went through each of his pitching decisions, especially in the eighth and ninth. The job, Butera says, is to prepare his players as well as possible and then put them in position to succeed. By that description, no matter the final score, he had failed in a few big spots.
It was nothing new, either, losing time and sleep to the noise inside his head. On this night, though, there was a twist: The noise was so loud that Butera opened up to his wife.
Trending
Sign up for The Washington Sun Metro newsletter for essential coverage of the D.C. region.
Somewhere along the line, Caroline Margolis started reading for about an hour after Butera returned from games, knowing he needed a bit before chatting. But now Blake was talking, venting, wondering why the losses felt so much worse than the wins felt good. And when she thanked him for finally saying all that, he realized how much he’d been holding in.
“I need to do a better job of sharing these things,” Butera, 34, told me a week later. “I’m just the type to internalize.”
By then, the Nats were in St. Louis, the start of their final road trip of the season. They had eight games left in 2026 and no shot at the playoffs, that pipe dream having faded quickly after they off-loaded three of their best players at the trade deadline. They had, though, already laid down a few markers of real progress: more wins than the previous year and almost 10 more wins than the Vegas lines had projected in March. Plus those four months of hanging-by-a-thread contention, charged by one of the best offenses in the sport.
But Butera, the youngest MLB manager since 1972, made fast work of any questions about that. He praised his coaching staff, calling it the best in the league, saying he sometimes had to ask his assistants to shut their laptops and work less. He praised his players, too, noting how well they took to a wave of new data and game day routines. He just wasn’t ready, at least not then, to praise himself. The losing record was one reason. The bullpen was another.
“It’s been really hard. I think the hardest part has been blowing 39 saves. I mean that’s real. Like, it’s still eating at me,” Butera told me. A few hours later, the Nats would blow their 40th and 41st saves in another extra-innings win. By the end of the season, the count was up to 42, five more than the previous MLB record.
Another lesson of his first season in charge: When your relievers can’t get high-leverage outs, rock bottom is hard to find.
“A lot of times when I talk to the front office, they’re basically telling me, like: ‘That was the right move, that’s exactly what you should have done, it just hasn’t worked out,’” he continued. “And that’s why I talk about the process. You know, sometimes your process can be right, the result can be bad. … But at the end of the day, there had to be a way that I could have prevented, you know, even just two of those blown saves. So I’m always looking myself in the mirror, and like that’s what’s made this year so hard. Just what could have been, you know, having the opportunity to blow 39 saves means that our position players played pretty well.”
He looked out at the field at Busch Stadium and seemed, honestly, pretty damn tired. I asked him, then, about the toll of so much self-examination over six months.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re drained,” he said. “When you blow this many saves and finish with a below .500 record, there are a lot of nights I haven’t slept because I’m trying to figure out ways to get us more wins and prevent some of those very hard blown saves. And whether there is something I could have done or not, I’m always going to look at it like it’s on me, like I let them down.”
Who, exactly?
“The team, the coaches, the front office, the organization, the people who hired me. The city of D.C. Heck, everyone who works at Nationals Park, the people selling food, taking tickets.”He looked out at the field again, squinting.
“Yeah, I mean, I owe it to all of them.”
* * *
Paul Toboni could have played it safe last October. Or at the very least, he could have played it a bit safer. He was, after all, in his first month as the Nats’ president of baseball operations. He was also just 35, young for any executive job in the sport, let alone one that would require an immediate overhaul of an entire organization.
Toboni, though, had little interest in the easy, intuitive choices for the team’s next manager. What he wanted to avoid — what he had identified as a potential trap — was making a hire that someone on ESPN praised because he’d landed a top name of the cycle. He wasn’t worried about convention or perception. He was worried about missing an opportunity.
So with that in mind, Toboni sent a quick text to Mike Gambino, the head coach at Penn State: Blake Butera? Knowing Toboni was filling out his major and minor league staffs, Gambino’s response was simple, too: Hire him. No brainer. Gambino, who coached Butera at Boston College, didn’t even ask what Toboni was thinking for him. Butera had already been a minor league manager and was now the Rays’ farm director. Gambino figured any high-up job in player development was the perfect fit.
“And then he called and told me he was considering Blake for major league manager,” Gambino told me. “I’m like: ‘Oh. Oh, wow.’ But that didn’t change my answer, of course. It was still yes, yes, yes.” When Gambino was recruiting Butera out of Louisiana, he had just taken the job at Boston College, where the Eagles were in a rebuild of sorts. Gambino needed baseball junkies to reset the program’s culture. To that end, he needed guys who could stomach a good bit of losing with the goal of winning later. (Sound familiar?)
For Butera, that meant starting as a freshman for a team that finished 22-33, including a 10-20 record in its conference. And if the Eagles were blown out, Gambino noticed Butera taking it particularly hard, blaming himself for the loss over tiny details. Like, for example, maybe BC wouldn’t have lost 9-2 if Butera had known to move 3 feet to his left before a pitch, which resulted in a ground ball that went just past him at second base. It was a kind of mental torture, Gambino thought, but he also knew where Butera was coming from. He felt like he could relate.
At first, Gambino focused on easing the burden on Butera, letting him maintain a high standard without going insane. Later, though, when Butera was a clubhouse veteran, the coach would walk him through the strategic reasons for the occasional blowout loss. If, say, Gambino didn’t think the Eagles could come back in a tight game, he might turn to a young reliever to eat innings, which might make a deficit balloon from 4-2 to 9-2. The score, then, didn’t come about because Butera narrowly missed one ground ball. Sometimes it was a choice, in a sense, and Butera could have done absolutely nothing to change it.
“He liked learning all of that and had a knack for it,” Gambino said. “But it still never made him go any easier on himself.”
* * *
After three years at Boston College, Butera was drafted by the Rays in the 35th round of the 2015 draft, pick No. 1,048. He would, in total, play in 80 minor league games across two summers, never making it higher than low-A. He also hit three home runs, one of which made a Rays team official unofficially rename a tree.
Yes, a tree.
Mitch Lukevics is a baseball lifer, having spent the last two decades in player development with Tampa Bay. On July 20, 2016, he was at H.P. Hunnicutt Field, then the home of the Princeton Rays, when Butera hit a homer that barely cleared the wall in left-center field. A few feet from the fence, there was a tree Lukevics started calling “the Butera Tree,” a loving joke about Butera’s lack of pop.
Once someone makes it far enough in sports, little tidbits from their past morph into metaphors to make a bigger point, to explain what and how and why. And the Butera Tree illustrates a player who got everything he could out of a listed frame of 5-foot-9 and 175 pounds. When, after that 2016 season, the Rays approached him about retiring to start as a minor league coach, the choice was easy. He didn’t fret about losing the identity he had spent decades building. He knew it was time.
“I hear a lot of people talk about how hard it is at first, because they think they could have done just a bit more,” Butera said. “But look at me: I’m short, I’m small. I still got drafted to play professionally in spite of that. At the end of your career, at the end of the night, if you can look in the mirror and say, ‘Yeah, I did everything I could,’ then you’ll be able to live with yourself.”
And so that’s now a metaphor for a manager who knows himself, including what he doesn’t know.
“It’s a self-awareness that not a lot of young men in this game have,” Lukevics said. “So I don’t care how green he maybe was for the managing job. A person who’s willing to admit their mistakes is going to get better, right? It’s not fun, either. No one likes doing that. But I think he always will, because he always has.”
Over three days in late September, I asked as many people as I could what stood out about Butera in his first season. One coach mentioned that Butera always walked with his head up, making eye contact with everyone he passes. Another complimented how Butera juggled all of the team’s pregame, postgame and player-specific meetings — adding that the Nats, an org now run by young millennials, must lead the league in Slack messages. And another coach said that given how well Butera commands a room, he wished he would pick even more spots to address the team and staff. That coach assumed this would come with more time in the job. (The same day he told me this, Butera benched James Wood, his best player, for not hustling to first base and then quickly addressed it in a quiet chat with Wood in front of his teammates and reporters in the clubhouse.)
But in one way or another, everyone I spoke with talked about how Butera solicited feedback on his in-game moves, especially with the bullpen. After many losses this season, he would sit with Toboni, general manager Ani Kilambi and various coaches to break down what went wrong. They would review how they used data, the driver of many strategic decisions, and when they trusted their gut to deviate from the plan. They would also pore over the next roster move, spending six months shuttling in rookies, waiver claims and scrap-heap signings. And night after night, game after game, blown save after blown save, Butera was at the center of those discussions, pushing the room to critique him as much as they saw fit.
“It really upsets him when we lose a game or whatever it might be,” Toboni said. “But one of the big reasons why he is upset, we kind of have a little bit of a funky definition of integrity, which is basically when you feel like there’s a chance that you are not doing your job, that really upsets you, because deep down inside it hurts you that you’re letting your teammates down. Blake has that to like the nth degree.”
* * *
A few hours after our conversation at Busch Stadium, it was happening again. The Nationals had a three-run lead at the start of the seventh. But then the leadoff batter reached on an error, then scored when Richard Lovelady, a lefty reliever, made a throwing error that turned the inning sideways with one out. With two outs, a single shaved the Nats’ lead by another run. So Butera took a slow walk to the mound, replacing Lovelady with Jack Sinclair. The manager kicked some dirt off the rubber, cleaning it for Sinclair, before handing him the ball and patting his shoulder. And then, back in the dugout, Butera took his seat by the steps and watched. And hoped. And at one point, after Sinclair fell behind in a count, Butera put his hands on his knees and leaned forward, as if he were sick on an airplane.
Yeah, yeah, we’re drained, he had said, and here was what that looked like in practice. Rubbing his palms on his pants. Covering his mouth to mutter something to Simon Mathews, his pitching coach. Another single put two runners on. Butera spit on the ground. But Sinclair wiggled out of the mess, stranding a pair on the base paths.
The Nats would go on to blow another late lead before pulling out a victory, just like in that game against the Angels. And soon, once the season ended, they would start their autopsy of the first year of a new era, including a hard, painful look at how they managed and constructed their pen.
But for now, with disaster averted for a short while longer, I could see Butera’s deep breath from the fourth deck of the stadium. Activity swirled around him, the well-oiled choreography of flipping from defense to offense, the dugout swelling with the nine players who came in from the field. He seemed, in that moment, to take a second or two to himself, a pause before the next decision tied knots inside his brain. And it looked, all at once, like both a hard and easy place to feel alone.
Author
