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A key is building a staff without groupthink.

While newly minted manager, Blake Butera, begins his tenure on paternity leave, he is expected to begin working on Monday. From what we heard, Butera has already been penciling up ideas. His phone was blowing up with congratulations on the birth of his daughter as well as his new job with the Washington Nationals. This will be a week that Butera will never forget.

This is all part of a process. The next steps will be setting up a coaching staff with President of Baseball Operations Paul Toboni. Give it time. We will have many more names here soon.

This morning, the Washington Nationals officially named Blake Butera the eighth manager in team history.  Today’s announcement was made by Nationals President of Baseball Operations Paul Toboni. Butera’s name goes next to some of the greats in baseball history like Frank Robinson, Davey Johnson, Dusty Baker, and yes, even Dave Martinez who hoisted the World Series trophy for the Washington Nationals exactly six years ago last night.

After PoBO Paul Toboni was hired by the Washington Nationals, he said that hiring a manager was a top priority. There is no surprise that Toboni went for a minor league manager with a record of success. It was part of our poll where we not only named Matt LeCroy from the Nats’ Triple-A affiliate as a candidate, but also a choice for an un-named minor league manager — now has the name, Blake Butera.

My suggestion, after the Texas Rangers manager named Skip Schumaker as their manager and took him off the board early as a candidate, was to go the route of a minor league manager or top collegiate head coach — and marry that person up with a tactical bench coach like Chip Hale who was the Nats’ 2019 World Series bench coach. The yin to the yang.