Blake Butera is starting to assemble his staff for the Washington Nationals. First, he hired Michael Johns to be his bench coach, now he has hired a pitching coach. Multiple reports indicate that the Nationals will be hiring Reds assistant pitching coach Simon Mathews.
As has been the trend with many
of these hires, the Nationals are going with a young guy. Mathews is only 30 years old and coming off his first season as assistant pitching coach with the Reds. However, that lack of experience did not stop Paul Toboni and Blake Butera from making him the main man on the pitching side.
Interestingly, before Mathews was an assistant pitching coach with the Reds, he worked on the pitcher rehab side of things. With the explosion of pitcher injuries around baseball, this is an interesting perspective to bring to the table.
Mathews also knows the city well. He actually went to Georgetown University, where he played on the team and graduated in 2017. Mathews played professionally from 2017 to 2019, before going into coaching.
Mathews is certainly a new school guy. He worked for Driveline, a prominent pitching lab and was the Director of Pitching at another pitching lab called Push Performance. I thought the Nationals had an outdated pitching philosophy where they threw too many fastballs as a team last year. That should change under Mathews.
This is a very on brand hire for Toboni and Butera. It is a big departure from the old way of doing things in DC and is a bit of a risk. However, I am all for some experimentation after the way things have gone the past few seasons. The organization desperately needed to spice things up and they are doing that.
I would not be surprised if the hitting coach hire was another young up and coming coach. It seems to be what both Toboni and ownership want to do right now. After the older regime failed, they are going young. Could they be over correcting too much? Maybe, but in my opinion it is worth a shot.
