Blake Butera has made his first big staffing hire as Washington Nationals manager. One of the biggest calls the 33 year old had to make was hiring a bench coach. With Butera being the youngest manager in over 50 years, he needed to put experience around him. He has done that by hiring Michael Johns from the Tampa Bay Rays.
We wrote about how Butera needed to nail the bench coach hire and bring in an older, more experienced voice. In the article, we talked about how someone with managerial experience would benefit Butera a lot. While Johns does not have MLB management experience, he managed in the Minor Leagues for nearly a decade. Johns has also been the first base coach for the Tampa Bay Rays the last two seasons.
Having worked in the Rays organization since 2008, Johns has a lot of history with Butera. While Butera was a manager in the Rays system, Johns was actually his Minor League Field Coordinator. As a field coordinator, he oversaw the minor league coaching staff and gave them instructions. He was pretty much Butera’s boss.
At 50 years old, Johns is an old head in this organization. Paul Toboni’s hires have all been very young so far. Of course, he is just 35 and Butera is even younger at 33. Both Devin Pearson and Justin Horowitz are also in their 30’s. It is nice to see them balance that out with a more experienced presence.
Like Butera, Johns has served in many roles across the Rays organization. That gives him a good perspective on the inner workings of an organization and how things operate. While he only has two years of experience in an MLB dugout, he has been in the big leagues and knows what it is like to work with MLB players.
While it is not the biggest name, I like this hire. Johns is an older guy that Butera will 100% trust. Hiring a bigger name bench coach with MLB manager experience could have been smart, but it also had the chance to create an awkward dynamic. Butera still needs to assert himself as the boss, and having a former manager could have challenged that authority.
I am curious to see how the rest of the coaching staff comes along. The hitting and pitching coach hires are the two I am looking at the most now. Jim Hickey and Darnell Coles have been much maligned over the past few years. Toboni now has the chance to bring in more modern coaches at those positions. It is unclear how this Toboni experiment will go, but one thing is clear, the Nationals are going to be doing things differently.
