Remember those days in elementary school when your teacher was out sick, and you could take advantage and goof on the substitute teacher? Washington Nationals manager Blake Butera has to make sure that he sets the standard early in camp, and isn’t taken advantage of. He talked the talk in early interviews of what he expects as a minimum from his players — but we know that the Nats have lacked discipline for a long time. And there were no questions asked of Butera as to what would happen if a player doesn’t run a Hard-90.
You always hope that the Nats brass reads TalkNats, and we inspire positive change. Here we talked about “Please run a Hard-90” and shortly afterwards, Butera said it. A welcomed response of expectations. But what if he doesn’t get his players to do it?
“We need to be fundamentally sound. The biggest thing for me is control the controllables. We’re going to play hard. We’re going to do the little things right. Are we going to win every game? No. But if you control the things that we can control — run a Hard-90.”
— Butera said at his introductory interview with Dan Kolko
That is called talking the talk. We heard the same from former Nats managers. And Dave Martinez‘s first season was plagued by players who didn’t play hard often enough. And that started in 2018 with Bryce Harper who jogged to first many times, and at a pace so slow that it was embarrassing. He did the same on defense. We saw it throughout Martinez’s tenure as players wouldn’t care. And while this happened more often on Martinez’s watch, we had seen it with other Nats’ managers too.
As a young manager, Butera, 33, has to set the tone early. And his boss needs to back him up on it. Maybe one of the worst displays of embarrassing plays was from Nyjer Morgan, a short-timer for the Nationals. But when he committed one of the most egregious plays in Nats Park history in 2010, he wasn’t even pulled from the game.
In that game on May 22, 2010, Morgan spiked his glove on the ground, and instead of a double, it turned into an inside-the-park home run. Morgan was credited with a home run off of Nats’ pitcher Craig Stammen. And Morgan stayed in to play the entire game, and started the next game too. Zero discipline. And you wonder why things go the way they go too often.
Will Butera be tested on hustle issues and playing the game the right way? You hope not. But baseball often tests the limits. People often test their boss. Sometimes it just happens subconsciously as you see when a player pops up a ball on a meatball and slams his bat down in frustration and slow-jogs it out. Maybe you can excuse that with a warning. Again, this is up to Butera. But since he said it, we have the videotape. How he deals with it is going to be the issue.
Team before self. You know the old saying, there is no “I” in t-e-a-m. In a young team, this might be easier to control the controllables. Set the tone early, and a suggestion to Butera: Have players sign your code of conduct and spell it out that if you don’t run a Hard-90 you will be pulled from the game. Other managers have disciplined this before. It was a given on the Cubs teams when Joe Maddon was the manager. Most recently, Aaron Boone benched Gleyber Torres in in August 2024 for failing to hustle out of the batter’s box, which turned a potential double into a single, and subsequently failing to score on a later play.
In Nats lore, former manager Matt Williams famously benched Harper in 2014 for not running hard to first base on a groundout, stating it was for a “lack of hustle“. That was in the first few weeks of Williams taking over for Davey Johnson as the Nats manager.
“It was the inability to run 90 feet — lack of hustle. He had to come out of the game. We made an agreement, his teammates made an agreement: When we play the game … we hustle at all times. We play the game with intensity, with willingness to win.”
— Williams said after benching Harper
“Regardless of the situation, regardless of what’s happening to you personally, we have to play the game a certain way to give us the best chance to win. … For the sake of the organization, he needs to play with aggression in the way he plays.”
“[Harper’s] spot came up with the ability to win the game. That’s a shame for his teammates.”
Not every fan agreed with Williams at the time. But his team that year went to the playoffs. Martinez’s 2018 team didn’t make the playoffs as Harper loafed on the regular. Say what you want about Williams, that took guts. Unfortunately, that was one of the few things that Williams did right.
This will be a learning curve for all of us to see what type of a manager Butera will be with this 2026 Nats’ squad. As of now, he is older than all of his players except for Trevor Williams who most likely will start the season on the 60-day IL. And Butera also admitted at the Hot Stove event on Saturday that he has no innings logged in a Major League dugout. We will learn about him in real-time just like all new managers.
As they say, sports are the greatest reality show. You never know what will happen.
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