first of three days with the Nats out here as they celebrate the start of a new season and camp continues as they get tuned up for a lengthy major league marathon and we're joined now by their first year manager blake butera kind enough to stop by thank you for a few minutes we appreciate it always good to be here thanks for having me how is spring training number one treating you so far? And what surprised you about sitting in the boss seat to this point?

I don't think it's about this, anything about the seat maybe specifically. It's more so just about

the guys, right? Like just having a chance to talk to them in the offseason. I know I told you guys

in November, like it's just been awesome to hear how hungry and motivated they are.

And then you get here and you actually get to know them and spend time with them face to

face and realize, like, everything you're hearing on the phone is exactly right.

And even more, like, these guys are, they were all here early weeks before they needed to be here

or out there for optional early work defense the things that you

know you don't necessarily call fun like everyone likes to hit when you see guys out there working

on their defense and their base running early it just goes to show that there's great kids in

this clubhouse there's great players they're hungry they're motivated and makes it exciting for us as a staff well we were in the clubhouse. There's great players. They're hungry. They're motivated. And it makes it exciting for us as a staff.

Well, we were in the clubhouse for about 10 minutes. We got in this morning. And it became pretty clear that it's now, I don't want to say standard practice, but pretty common that guys, once their work's done, a lot of times you're sticking around. We've been coming down here a lot of years. And it doesn't mean like previous teams were like that bad chemistry and then like that when someone wasn't doing that.

But I think it kind of speaks to what you're talking about. There seems to be a degree of we're all in this together. I'm hanging out for my teammates. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think that speaks to guys showing up early, right? Yeah. Position players being in here for pitchers and catchers camp before they needed to be here just because they want to be around their teammates. They want to get to know everybody. They want to be together. They miss each other over the offseason. And we have a lot of new faces too. And it seems like, you know, all these players are pretty excited to get to know kind of the direction we're going to be going in. and it's our job as a staff and as a group to make sure that's clear. What are some of the things, Blake, that you guys are harping on, focusing on the most, and emphasis, and I don't just mean maybe like, oh, we're handling the fundamentals or whatever, but even within the game, like, let's turn hard hit balls into this kind of launch angle window.

Like, what are the areas that you would say, here's the emphasis of our camp so far?

There's a lot of things.

And I don't want to get too deep into this. But, you know, one thing we met on this morning was about making sure our players know that

these next seven to ten days in spring training,

if they hit a base hit to the outfield, if they think there's a chance they can make it to second base and turn into a double, go for it. Like find out what you can and can't do right now. But at the end of the day, like if we're going to err on one side or the other, we're going to err on the aggressive side and we're going to run the bases really hard. also talked about holding runners tighter

and things that maybe

don't show up in the box score or the stat sheet, so to speak,

but the things that help you win ball games, the smaller details. I think fans really care

about and appreciate. Those are the things we're going to be really good at.

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