Last night in the top of the sixth inning, with another early Nats lead quickly evaporated into a tense 5-3 contest, Foster Griffin threw his 94th pitch for ball 4 and a two out walk to Austin Riley summoning Blake Butera from the dugout. For anyone who’s watched the Nationals for this first month of the season it felt inevitable that Butera would, almost robotically, remove Griffin from the game. So far, the Nationals have had only one starter make it through six innings (Cade Cavalli on April 1) and this hardly looked like the time for an exception.
Instead, an exception was made and Butera had his first Max Scherzer mound visit, a deke to get the starter fired up to finish off one last batter. Griffin delivered in two pitches getting Mauricio Dubón to ground out and preserve the Nationals’ lead through the troublesome middle innings. The Nats offense responded in kind by tacking six more runs on the board leading to a feel-good, blowout win of first place Atlanta. Finally, Butera looked like a proper big league manager, instead of Paul Toboni’s spokesman.
That will be the first of many challenges Butera will have to take on as this Nats season gets into full swing. The afterglow of spring training has lifted and the team has entered into the grind, with plenty of bad habits that seemed banished on Opening Day suddenly popping up again.
On defense, the Nationals lead the league in errors with 23. On the basepaths, they’ve made some excruciating mistakes recently, including getting thrown out at third twice (the second time barely avoiding erasing a run scored) and failing to run out an infield grounder that could have been an extra innings walk-off all in one game on Saturday.
On the individual level, after hot starts, Brady House (77 wRC+) and Luis García Jr. (58 wRC+) have fallen into a slump. As promised this spring House has kept his chase rate down (33% vs. 41.5% in 2025), but he’s also lowered his in-zone contact rate to an abysmal 77 percent. Meanwhile, García has seemingly made zero changes to his game, including a titanic struggle to identify the right pitches to swing at. If the Nats want their offense to last beyond this James Wood hot streak, Butera is going to need to find a way to help these hitters get on track. It’s easy to work on a new approach in spring, but as we’ve seen with CJ Abrams the last two seasons, the real challenge will be helping these hitters be consistent over an entire season.
Toboni has not made the job any easier by shuffling relief pitchers faster than Ricky Jay shuffled cards. Yes, the Nationals are not the only team in baseball that takes advantage of option years to turn an eight pitcher bullpen into 11 or 12 to make sure they have fresh relievers whenever necessary. However, most of those other teams are asking their relievers to sacrifice for the greater good of a playoff team, not in a desperate attempt to prop up the re-animated corpse of Miles Mikolas.
It might be good front office strategy, but Butera’s stuck with the tough job of trying to tell Orlando Ribalta why he’s being sent down right after being trusted to earn his first career save in extra innings on the road. Or thank Andrew Alvarez for salvaging a game against the Giants after Mikolas managed only 4 innings with the crutch of an opener then tell him that the Nats do not have a rotation spot open yet.
There have been some encouraging signs that Butera is up to the challenge beyond finally letting Griffin be a real pitcher for a day. Spencer Nusbaum had a great article yesterday about the Nationals’ new approach to player accountability and how they try to work out mistakes as a group. This goes back to how important teaching will be as a philosophy for this staff, but eventually the results on the field need to back up the process off of it. As the season wears on accountability needs to move from inside the clubhouse to the field, both in the form of improved performance and loss of playing time and status for those who cannot hold up their end of the bargain. And with a young, mistake prone offense alongside an old, mostly broken pitching staff, Butera certainly has his work cut out for him.
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