Butera sees motivated young players, preps for possibility of more trades

ORLANDO, Fla. – Though filling out what’s now a 12-man coaching staff has occupied the majority of Blake Butera’s time the last month, the Nationals’ new manager has also made a point to reach out to his entire roster of players and start to develop relationships with every one of them long before they report to spring training.

His biggest takeaway from those conversations? These players are extremely motivated to get better, and they’re ready to put in the work that will be required.

“Obviously, I didn’t get to talk to these guys until after I signed on for the job,” Butera said. “But I told (president of baseball operations Paul Toboni) right away: ‘Man, I was really excited about this.’”

The roster Butera inherits is one of the youngest and least experienced in baseball. It’s coming off a hugely disappointing season that included 96 losses, bottom-of-the-league rankings in a number of meaningful categories and the midsummer firings of their longtime general manager and manager.

Several players have acknowledged the team’s struggles in fundamental areas and a desire to clean that up, no matter their own personal accomplishments. And they quickly conveyed that message to their rookie manager.

“James Wood,” Butera said, citing the club’s best hitter. “I’m talking to him, and he’s like: ‘Yeah, last year was horrible.’ I’m like: ‘James, there’s a lot of guys that are 22 years old that would take that season in a heartbeat.’ He’s like: ‘Yeah, but the end of the year wasn’t good.’

“I talked to Daylen Lile. I’m like: ‘What are you working on?’ He’s like: ‘My defense is horrible. There’s no reason that someone with my athleticism is not a good defender.’

“And Dylan Crews, the same thing. I talked to him, and he’s like mad on the phone. ‘Dylan, you've got time.’

“They're hungry. They're super motivated.”

Butera has already seen tangible evidence of that. He said Wood has been working specifically on defense in recent days with new bench coach Michael Johns at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla.

“Man, James really wants to be a good outfielder,” Johns conveyed to Butera. “Somebody that young that has had the amount of success he’s had with that many home runs, the fact they actually want to work on their pre-pitch and their first step in the outfield in December is pretty cool to see.”

Other members of the coaching staff have been making plans to meet with various players in-person this winter, based on their respective offseason homes. That coaching staff, like the roster, is extraordinarily young. Butera, 33, has never played nor managed above Single-A. Only three of the 12 coaches are over 40. Many have never coached in the major leagues before.

Butera insists that wasn’t by design. He did want to make sure he had some experience by his side, which he does in the form of Johns, 50, catching coach Bobby Wilson, 42, assistant pitching coach Sean Doolittle, 39, and others.

But he also wanted to make sure he had coaches who could relate well to young ballplayers from a wide variety of backgrounds, especially those who have had success developing prospects in the minor leagues.

“The biggest thing is, we wanted to bring in good people,” Butera said. “And then on top of that, this is a young roster, and the common theme from a lot of the players was: We have a long ways to go, we have a next gear to get to. Yeah, we’re in the big leagues, but we’re also super-young. We want to develop and we want to continue to get better. So we want a staff that’s going to push us and help us grow. That’s kind of the staff we built out.”

Butera and his staff are starting to figure out how they want their lineup to look, how they want to align their outfield, how they want the catching competition to shake out, how they want to use certain pitchers. At the same time, he understands the potential wrenches that could be thrown into that process if his boss decides to trade away core pieces in the coming weeks.

Toboni already dealt closer Jose A. Ferrer to the Mariners, bringing in a top-rated young catcher in Harry Ford but depleting an already-thin bullpen. And with MacKenzie Gore and CJ Abrams also drawing plenty of interest from other clubs this winter, more changes could be forthcoming.

How does Butera deal with that kind of uncertainty as he preps for his first season in the majors after a brief, but highly successful, stint as a minor league manager with the Rays?

“It’s funny, I didn’t really prepare for this to happen,” he said. “But coming over from the Rays, it’s like what the Rays do every year. It feels like such a weird thing to everyone when you talk about it. But it’s like: Man, this is every offseason with Tampa Bay.”