When Blake Butera steps into the visiting dugout at Wrigley Field for the Nationals’ Opening Day game against the Cubs on March 26, not only will it be the 33-year-old’s first time in a major league dugout, it will be the first time he’s been in any dugout since 2022, his last season as manager of the Charleston RiverDogs in the Rays’ minor league system.

The Rays had since moved Butera into a front office role. In 2023, he was Tampa Bay's assistant field coordinator. And for the past two years, he’s been the Rays senior director of player development.

That experience helped make Butera one of the fast-rising names around baseball, eventually landing him on new Nationals president of baseball operations Paul Toboni’s list of managerial candidates and then as the choice to become the youngest major league manager since the Twins hired Frank Quilici in 1972 (also 33).

“I obviously enjoyed my time managing with the Rays and then when they brought this next opportunity up to me, it was something that was obviously on a broader spectrum, with a lot more players, a lot more staff members to oversee,” Butera said of his move to the Rays front office during his introductory press conference at Nationals Park on Monday afternoon. “I think it was something that gave me a much better perspective of how to build an organization from the ground up and what goes into creating a winning culture, creating a winning team, creating a winning organization. And I think when this next opportunity came about, I always loved being on the field. I love the competition. I love being with the guys every day. So this is a no-brainer.”

After spending four years managing the lower levels of the Rays’ minor league system – earning his first managing gig at just 25 years old and during which he guided his teams to four straight first-place finishes and back-to-back league championships in 2021 and 2022 – the organization felt he was ready to oversee one of the best minor league systems in all of baseball at just 30 years old.

Now he’s bringing that experience back to the dugout, this time as the skipper of the Nationals at the major league level.

“When you look at the whole player development process, there's a lot that goes into it, from the acquisition of players to creating plans for players to improve and what their timeline looks like to get to the major leagues,” he said. “So I think just the whole broad and global outlook of a player's process and a player's journey kind of helped make it a little bit easier transition.”

The Rays have been one of the most successful teams in doing more with less. With a consistently small payroll, Tampa Bay thrives in drafting, signing and developing players into productive big leaguers. They are the envy of any team who tries to build a winning team without competing with the big-market clubs, who sign top free agents to record-breaking contracts seemingly every winter.

What, if anything, can Butera take from Tampa Bay’s model of player development success and implement here in Washington?

“The culture is the biggest thing,” he said. “I think we need to create an environment where players feel challenged at all times, but also supported. That's something that's really important and something that Tampa Bay does a great job of. They're always going to be upfront with their players in terms of what their deficiencies might be. But there's also an art to it where you don't just tell a player what they need to get better at. You tell them where we view them, where we think they can get to and then make sure we support the heck out of them to get them there.”

Butera will be building that culture from a different, yet familiar vantage point now. Instead of behind-the-scenes meetings or minor league trips throughout the country, he’ll be doing it from the manager’s seat with the Nats. Although it’s been three years since he’s sat in such a seat, he’s excited to return to leading a team on the field again.

“There's two things. One, I think the competition,” Butera said. “When you're in it, when you're in the dugout every night, you feel the competition and the desire to win. I think secondly, one thing that I missed the most was, when you're with this group every day for six, seven, eight months, it's never a smooth ride. There's always going to be ups and downs and highs and lows for every player in that clubhouse. And building those relationships and seeing players at their lowest of lows, and then helping them through some of those things and seeing them ultimately get back to the top throughout the end of the year, there's no more rewarding feeling than that.”

Butera has wasted no time in starting to build those relationships with his new players. He’s already had phone conversations with 20-plus players currently on the Nationals roster, with more to come. And he’s excited to start working with the young core of budding stars the Nats already have in place and use his experience in player development to make them even better at the major league level.

“The young talent. I mean, it's all over the place,” Butera said of what excites him about the roster during a scrum with local reporters after the presser. “And I think what stands out to me even more, I think I mentioned it during the press conference, was talking to each of these players individually, just how consistent and constant they were about wanting to get better. How hungry and driven they were. That to me is something where, you know, a lot of times you get to the major leagues, some players feel like they made it. Where it was, like, this group of players, everyone I was talking to is like, 'Yeah, we're OK where we're at. But we have a lot more in the tank. We're not even anywhere near our ceiling yet.'”