We've reached the final week of the year, so it's time to look back at the Nationals' most significant stories of 2025. We continue the series today with the hirings of Paul Toboni as president of baseball operations, Anirudh Kilambi as general manager and Blake Butera as manager ...
It had been a long time since the Nationals found themselves searching for a new manager, longer still since they found themselves searching for a new general manager. And never before had they found themselves searching for both at the same time.
But when members of the Lerner family decided to fire both Mike Rizzo and Davey Martinez on the same Sunday afternoon in early-July, this was the situation they created for themselves. They were going to finish out the season with interim replacements. Then they were going to have to decide who should get both jobs on a permanent basis.
First up, the GM position. The Nats could have opted to retain Mike DeBartolo, Rizzo’s longtime No. 2 in the front office who admirably took over during a time of turmoil and earned praise for navigating the franchise through the MLB Draft and trade deadline. In the end, ownership chose to go completely outside the organization and start fresh with one of the sport’s up-and-comers.
Paul Toboni was only 35, but he had spent the last decade climbing the ladder in the Red Sox organization and seemingly was in line to become their GM underneath chief baseball officer Craig Breslow. Until the Nationals lured him away with an offer of an even loftier title (president of baseball operations) and the keys to the entire front office.
“We were going to hold a pretty high bar if we were going to leave the Boston Red Sox organization,” Toboni said at his Oct. 1 introductory press conference. “And this cleared it because of that: Ownership’s love of baseball, and how competitive they are. And really, how great of people they are. That’s what I really bought into, which made my wife and I think this was the jump we were going to make.”
Toboni’s to-do list was lengthy from the moment he took the job. And he still hasn’t crossed off every item. But his two most-pressing tasks from the outset were to reshape the front office in his image and hire a manager.
When it came to the front office, a host of longtime Nationals employees were let go, with DeBartolo (named senior vice president and assistant GM) one of the lone holdovers. Toboni hired two more assistant GMs who previously worked with him in Boston: Devin Pearson (who will oversee player development) and Justin Horowitz (who will oversee all forms of acquisitions).
The final piece to that puzzle was the recent hiring of Anirudh Kilambi as GM, a position Toboni wasn’t sure he was going to fill this winter but ultimately decided to give to the 31-year-old data guru who previously worked for the Rays and Phillies. Kilambi, who now becomes the No. 2 voice in baseball operations.
An organization that admittedly trailed the rest of the industry in data and technology now has one of the sport’s foremost minds in those areas in a prominent position, will clear objectives in mind.
“Can we acquire players who we identify more quickly than the industry, that we are more accurate on than the industry? Can we develop players faster than the industry?” Kilambi said. “And a lot of this comes down to a combination of urgency, competitiveness and just really sharp eyes for talent.”
The front office is young and forward-thinking, and though Toboni insists this wasn’t part of some grand plan, the Nationals’ new manager and coaching staff also fit that description.
In an offseason marked by several out-of-the-box managerial hires around baseball, Blake Butera stands out on his own. At 33, he’s the youngest MLB manager in five decades. He’s never played nor coached above Single-A. But he won rave reviews for his work as a minor league manager and player development head with the Rays, and now he’s tasked with helping teach one of the youngest rosters in the sport how to become a winning major league team.
“I didn’t play in the major leagues, but I was in their position not too long ago,” Butera said at his mid-November introductory press conference. “I think just understanding them and meeting them where they’re at, and knowing they can always have someone they can go to, is really important.”
Butera’s 12-man staff might be the youngest in MLB history, with only three coaches over 40 and four coaches 31 or younger. Like Toboni’s front office, it includes only one prominent holdover (Sean Doolittle), with everyone else coming from other organizations, the college game or even private pitching and hitting labs.
The hope is that the Nationals identified future stars and hired them before their professional stock rose too high and prompted other clubs to bring them aboard. But there are no guarantees. Three years from now, we may be heaping praise on them for having the foresight to overhaul their entire operation with the next generation of great executives and coaches. Or we may be shaking our heads and muttering to ourselves “What were they thinking?” as the club slogs its way through an endless rebuild with no significant progress.
One way or another, we’ll be looking back at the fall of 2025 as a critical period in the history of the Nationals, one that saw them break away from longtime bonds and take a chance on an entirely new group of people turning this stagnant franchise back into a winner.