“Age is just a number” is a popular saying, meaning your chronological age shouldn’t define who you are. While some view it as a myth, it’s often used to promote defying limitations in so many aspects of life, work, and balance. “Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number” became a song, but mostly the popular saying was used about the aging process and age discrimination of older people. Forbes wrote an article about it, and others have too.
Now this age thing has led to debates in Washington Nationals territory since the hiring of so many millenials and Gen X employees in the front office and the dugout and bullpen, and throughout the player development system of the minor leagues. The oldest known hire by the team is bench coach Michael Johns who is 50.
When the Washington Nationals hired a 35-year-old as their President of Baseball Operations with Paul Toboni back in September, he hired a younger manager, Blake Butera, 33, and if that wasn’t a trend in that direction, Toboni hired a 31-year-old general manager, Anirudh Kilambi, whose hiring became official this morning. Add up their exact ages, and guess what, they are just over 100 combined. A century of total existence.
Washington won their first World Series just over 100 years ago in 1924. That World Series manager, Bucky Harris, was just 27 years old and dubbed “The Boy Wonder.” The youngest to ever win a World Series as a manager. His star player, Walter Johnson was 36 years old.
“Ani has earned a reputation around the industry as one of the brightest front office minds in the game. He’s not only a sharp and strategic leader who is a great communicator, but he is also thoughtful and humble and aligns with our values. Ani is an excellent complement to the leadership group we have in place, both in terms of his past experiences and who he is as a person.”
— Toboni said this morning
The Phillies hired Kilambi directly from Tampa as an Assistant GM under President of Baseball Operations Dave Dombrowski and GM Sam Fuld when Kilambi was just 27 years old. Did Dombrowski care that Kilambi was younger than a shirt that he still had in his closet? He explicitly stated that Kilambi possesses a “terrific work ethic and a collaborative and creative mind” that the Phillies were looking for at the time. They wanted the Phillies to be a leader in the analytics space and that led to Kilambi’s hiring in 2021. Age was not a factor nor was his salary. Research and development (R&D) was the focus there.
Fuld said in an interview with Alex Coffey of the Philadelphia Inquirer that, “[Kilambi] is obsessed with baseball. He is (change that to ‘was’ now) obsessed with helping the Phillies win. It just shows in the way he speaks about the game.” Coffey went on to write, “Kilambi liked to analyze. He enjoyed thinking about problems and how to solve them. When he was a teenager, he spent hours creating a projection system that he ran out of an Excel document to evaluate free-agent contracts and team decisions. He called it “BEAnS”: Baseball Empirical Analysis System.” “[Kilambi] was receptive to the idea that he didn’t know everything,” said Peter Bendix, the Marlins president of baseball operations and former Rays general manager. “And that’s a very impressive skill to have for somebody who knows a lot.”
And Coffey continued, “James Click, who now works as the Toronto Blue Jays’ vice president, baseball strategy, overlapped with Kilambi for about five years with the Rays. He was impressed by Kilambi’s ability to incorporate the human element into his decisions.” Coffey wrote, “Kilambi works with all of the coaches, but he said he works with Cotham the most. They meet multiple times a week, and have open-ended conversations. Cotham believes that Kilmabi has made him a better coach.” “He’s done a fantastic job of providing resources to understand how we get the most out of our players,” Cotham said. “It could be pitch usage, it could be biomechanics, it could be how they think. It’s about giving us, as coaches, more tools to make a connection with a pitcher.”
If Kilambi was Toboni’s only hire who was aged under 40, we probably would not have to write this article. Chris Branch of The Athletic wrote, “The Nats’ absurdly young braintrust.” Yadda, yadda, yadda. We get it. These are the Washington Wunderkinds.
The Los Angeles Rams got a lot of heat for hiring a head coach named Sean McVay in 2017 at just 30 years old, making him the youngest head coach in modern NFL history, with questions about his youth and experience, though his innovative offense quickly proved doubters wrong, leading the Rams to a Super Bowl win.
Young coaches is one thing. Young baseball executives is nothing new. Theo Epstein and Jon Daniels were 28 when they first were hired to run their first teams, Epstein of the Red Sox and Daniels of the Texas Rangers. Even Dombrowski was only 31 when he took over the Montreal Expos, in 1988.
So my issue goes to what will Toboni do if one of his new hires is a bust? Will he pounce on it and fire the person or let it play out longer and risk further issues. Too often inside the offices of Nationals Park, former GM Mike Rizzo didn’t fire his hires, he just reassigned them to other positions. He did the same with some bad player acquisitions and draft picks too. My concerns are less about age and more about being good at their jobs.
The biggest risk was hiring Butera whose only MLB experience was as a fan attending games. “He blew me away throughout the [interview] process,” Toboni said. While Butera’s name had come up before, it was Hall-of-Famer Mike Piazza, who had Butera as a coach during the World Baseball Classic for the Italy team, and phoned Toboni to recommend Butera. And Butera became the youngest MLB manager in over 50 years since Frank Quilici was hired in 1972 by the Minnesota Twins. Butera’s rapid ascent followed a successful career in player development with the Tampa Bay Rays, where he also managed the Hudson Valley Renegades at 25, becoming the youngest MiLB manager at the time.
Butera addressed the topic of age directly, stating,
“When you talk with players and work with players, I think the last thing they look at is how old or young somebody might be”.
Butera emphasized that players care more about whether a coach cares about them as a person and can help them succeed on and off the field. When asked if age was a factor in hiring staff, he mentioned a joke made to him:
” ‘Did you tell Paul when you got hired that the staff has to be under 40 years old?’ You might not believe me, but no.”
DK wrote on TalkNats, “If we all knew that all of these hires would fall flat on their faces and fail miserably, then guess what, none of them would have been hired! That’s the beauty of this (and any) sport: the unpredictably. People fear change, especially unknown change.”
There are also some who keep harping on that maybe all of these hires were about saving money. We heard that line of thinking when Dave Martinez replaced Dusty Baker as the manager for a 2018 savings of $1.2 million in salary. After Martinez won the World Series a season later, nobody was talking about money any longer. And when Martinez got his next contract, it was in the millions and far-surpassed what Baker was paid. Martinez at one point was Top-7 reportedly in managerial contracts.
As a wise man said, nobody is taking these jobs for less money than they made before, and add to that all the additional personnel hired in the total number of people. The Nats for the first time since Stan Kasten/Mike Rizzo have a seperate GM and a PoBO. There are 14 uniformed MLB coaches versus 12 in the 2025 season. And four more pitching/hitting coordinators in the minors. New software and machines have been acquired. When you fire a highly paid GM and manager, you’d expect some savings in the short-term. But to insinuate that Toboni is making hires of youngins to save money is an accusation.
In the end, Toboni and the Lerner ownership group need this to be a McVay type of story, even though Quilici led the Twins to an 81-81 season in his first full year, the Twins moved on from him when his contract expired after three full seasons of hovering around .500. Coincidentally, it was the son of former Washington Senators’ owner, Cal Griffith, who hired Quilici, and then hired former Expos manager, Gene Mauch, to replace Quilici.
There will be trial and error. That is inevitable. Taking a line from a Taylor Swift song, “fake it ’til you make it,” her context refers to the lyrics in The Tortured Poets Department‘s “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” describing performing brilliantly while internally struggling (“They said, ‘Babe, you gotta fake it ’til you make it,’ and I did”) is how many people handle the challenges of moving up. Hopefully nobody has to fake it. Everyone comes to a point of a first time for something. How you handle it and succeed is part of the progress.
And you know Toboni is well aware of the ageist talk. And he keeps hiring them younger and younger. He believes he is doing the right thing. Again, the real test is going to be if he did the wrong thing, how will he react to that?
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