Blake Butera Sets Tone for a Hungry, Player First, Nationals Culture

At his first MLB Winter Meetings as a big-league manager, Blake Butera made it clear that 2026 for the Washington Nationals is about connection, competition, and pushing a young core to another level. After years managing in the minors and working in the Rays organization, he described this week in Orlando as less about spectacle and more about relationship-building. “It’s kind of a new group,” Butera said, noting he’s spent much of his time in the team suite “forming those relationships with the group and getting to know one another and kind of setting our tone for the season.”

One of the early signatures of Butera’s tenure is an unusually young coaching staff, something he insists was a byproduct of hiring the right people, not a mandate. “We wanted to make sure the biggest thing is we bring in good people,” he said, adding that with such a young roster, the goal was to hire coaches who would “push us to grow.” The youth doesn’t worry him; it excites him because of how “up to speed they are with this day and age of baseball” and their comfort with modern information and technology.

For Butera, the key is not drowning players in data but teaching coaches to “understand how to interpret the information and…understand when to deliver to players and what to deliver to players.” He gave a hypothetical example of not just handing everything to a player like MacKenzie Gore at once, but instead asking, “What do we want to talk about…and when’s the right time for him to hear it?”

Butera’s Rays background showed when he was asked about the ongoing trade chatter around names like Gore and CJ Abrams. He compared it to Tampa Bay’s annual offseasons, where there always seems to be a marquee name in rumors but the front office is simply doing its job by listening. “It’s not like we’re looking to move people or get rid of people,” he said. “MacKenzie, CJ, these guys are great players…We’d be crazy or not doing our job if we’re going to shut down any time a team reaches out.”

The new manager lit up when discussing the trade for catcher Harry Ford and how it reshapes the competition behind the plate. “You can never have enough catching,” Butera said, calling young, talented catching “really hard to get” and framing the Jose A. Ferrer–Ford swap as a move both clubs will “look back at… and say it really helped both sides.” He stressed that he wants “all these guys to come into Spring Training and compete,” believing players “get the most” from a truly competitive environment.

If there was a recurring theme, it was defense and versatility, heavily influenced by his Rays experience. Butera spoke enthusiastically about having multiple true center-field options in Dylan Crews and Jacob Young, saying it is “nice that we can have two guys that can play out there. Not just play out there, but play out there really well.” He also highlighted the arrival of Daylen Lile and James Wood, relaying that bench coach Michael Johns had just worked with Wood at IMG and came away impressed that “James really wants to be a good outfielder.”

What struck Butera most is that young offensive stars are voluntarily grinding on their gloves in December. “Daylen wants to work on his defense in the off-season,” he said. “No one wants to work on their defense in the off-season…The fact they actually want to go work on their pre-pitch and their first step in the outfield in December is pretty cool to see.” He added that the staff has been built with “defensive specialists” like Johns, Smarslok, Victor Estévez and Corey Ray to help players move around the diamond while still raising the club’s overall standard with the glove.

Asked directly whether Abrams is locked in at shortstop and Luis García Jr. at second, Butera backed his young star at the six. “I think we’re happy with CJ at short,” he said, while still noting that “everything’s on the table” in terms of defensive positioning if it helps get the best nine bats on the field. The expectation, though, is that Abrams can grow into an impact defender at one of the game’s most valuable spots.

Butera made it clear that he intends to sell defense as a career-maker to players like Abrams. With CJ, the message is simple: “You’re young. If you want to play this game for a long time and play the game at shortstop…you can make a lot of money and play this game for a really long time if you just stick at shortstop.” He believes once players fully understand “how important defense is” and buy in, you naturally see more early work, more reps, and more routine plays made.​

Butera’s comfort with technology stretches from player development to in-game decision-making. With the challenge-based Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system headed to the majors, he is “really excited about it,” having seen it in Triple-A and believing it can shift dugout energy away from arguing calls and toward simply saying, “Hey, challenge it.” He also noted that the system underscores just how “really, really good” big league umpires already are, given how hard it is to “lock in for that many pitches.”

In terms of analytics and probability driving tactical calls, Butera again referenced his time in Tampa Bay and the example of Kevin Cash. The plan is to continue building out the Nationals’ R&D department so the staff “feels really good how the information is coming together and then trusting those decisions.” Still, he emphasized that “there’s a gut instinct to it as well,” and that the art lies in blending both.​

Behind the scenes, Butera and his staff are already logging air miles and phone calls to build trust before anyone sets foot in West Palm Beach. The manager has already had lunch with Gore, while hitting coordinator Andrew Aydt is slated to see Young, and Estévez has met García in the Dominican during winter ball. “As a staff, one thing we’ve talked about…is just reach out to all the players,” Butera said. “It also shows them how much we care about them, want to get to know them, want to get this thing rolling rather than waiting until day one of Spring Training.”​

Even CJ Abrams, who has a reputation for being tough to pin down in the offseason, has been looped in. Butera said they’ve connected by phone and that Abrams invited him to Atlanta to see where he works out and hits at Maven. “He wants our help and direction,” Butera said, calling it “pretty fun” to align with the private coaches and facilities that already shape players’ routines.​

If Butera’s coaching staff is young, his players might be even hungrier. What jumped out to him in early conversations with top prospects and young big leaguers was how dissatisfied they were with seasons that many organizations would celebrate. “James Wood…was like, yeah, last year was horrible,” Butera recalled, adding that he reminded Wood that there are “a lot of guys that are 22 years old that would take that season in a heartbeat.” Daylen Lile told him he was focused on fixing his defense because “there’s no reason that someone with my athleticism is not a good defender,” while Crews was “mad on the phone” about his first taste of the majors.​

Butera sees that collective edge as the foundation of what a successful 2026 looks like. He described an ideal scene at Nationals Park where, for a 7 p.m. game, fans wandering in early see players already on the field at 2:30 or 3:00, grinding on specific parts of their game. “The more the season goes on, the more you see of that, the more I feel like our culture is moving in the right direction,” he said, emphasizing that if this young group is continually improving and the organization is simultaneously “building up the Minor League system,” then 2026 becomes the springboard that “sets us up for 2027 being awesome.”​

Few players will be more central to that vision than Crews, whose uneven debut did not rattle his new manager. “What we saw last year was not the Dylan Crews we know,” Butera said, calling him “such an explosive player” who has “had success his entire life.” He pointed to the “biggest gap in all of sports” between Triple-A and the majors and said the key will be Crews understanding that he can “still be Dylan Crews in the Big Leagues and be himself and have confidence, hey, I belong here…I’m an All-Star caliber player.​

That message, Butera admitted, applies to his own journey too. Veterans like Terry Francona and Kevin Cash, along with close friend and fellow first-time manager Craig Albernaz in Baltimore, have all told him the same thing: don’t change who you are. “There’s a reason why you’re in this role,” he said, paraphrasing their advice. “Just continue to be who you are… I’m telling Dylan this, and sometimes I need to tell myself the same thing.