MILWAUKEE — The Washington Nationals sign his paychecks now, but Blake Butera couldn’t help but smile at the final out of the ALCS.
For a decade, Butera was a Tampa Bay Ray. He was drafted by the organization in 2015, a 35th-rounder, the 1,048th pick. When it became clear in spring training 2017 that playing big-league ball wasn’t in the 5-foot-9, 175-pound infielder’s future, the Rays asked Butera to coach. He was released and hired on the same day, in the same meeting.
Still in his mid-20s, Butera climbed the organizational ladder, first as a minor-league skipper in towns such as Fishkill, New York, and Charleston, South Carolina, then as a roving field coordinator bouncing from affiliate to affiliate. At the end of 2023, Tampa Bay promoted Butera to senior director of player development, a role in which he impacted all corners of the organization.
He believed in the Rays, in large part, because the Rays had believed in him.
But last winter, the Nationals came calling. They believed in Butera, too, and were willing to make him, at 33 years old, the youngest big-league manager in more than half a century.
Last week, from his couch in North Carolina, Butera watched as the franchise to which he dedicated most of his professional life reached the doorstep of the mountaintop.
While Tropicana Field erupted in revelry after the Rays’ victory in ALCS Game 6, Butera sat in relative silence as his almost 1-year-old daughter, Blair, dozed nearby. He shot off a few congratulatory texts to old colleagues and forever friends, all the while feeling an odd combination of joy, pride, FOMO and competitive envy.
“It’s really hard to explain the feeling. I want these guys to win it,” he told Yahoo! Sports this week over the phone. “The relationships I have with the coaches, with the front office, with the players that are out there ... But also, yeah, it kind of stinks. I’m happy for these guys, but like, I want to be there [with the Nats]. You know? That’s the competitive side of it.”
Butera isn’t the only former Rays employee taking in this playoff run from afar with a mix of satisfaction and sporting covetousness. That’s mostly because he isn’t the only former Rays employee working somewhere else now. Not even close.
For the past two decades, the Rays have existed at and beyond baseball’s cutting edge. In the mid-2000s under then-GM Andrew Friedman, Tampa became one of the first organizations to fully embrace the advanced analytics that have since revolutionized the sport. As part of that, Friedman popularized the use of extreme defensive shifts, a trend that became so effective that MLB eventually instituted a rule change limiting the practice. Under current president of baseball operations Erik Neander in the late 2010s, the Rays became the first team to regularly have a reliever throw the first inning before turning the ball over to a more traditional starter. Now, on any given night in MLB, there’s an “opener” penciled in somewhere.
Most importantly, all that ingenuity led to wins — more wins since 2008 than any other club in baseball except the Dodgers and Yankees, in fact.
And success, as it so often does, led to poaching.
Five current head baseball operations executives once worked for Tampa: Los Angeles’ Andrew Friedman, St. Louis’ Chaim Bloom, Miami’s Peter Bendix, just-hired A’s head honcho Taylor Smith and Milwaukee’s Matt Arnold, who will try to topple his old club this week. Three general managers — Washington’s Ani Kilambi, Los Angeles’ Brandon Gomes and Miami’s Gabe Kapler — worked for or played for the Rays (or, in Kapler’s case, both). Five current managers — Butera, Minnesota’s Derek Shelton, Baltimore’s Craig Albernaz, Cleveland’s Stephen Vogt and Kansas City’s Matt Quatraro — spent time coaching or playing in Tampa’s minor-league system or with its big-league club.
This list doesn’t even include characters such as former Astros GM James Click, former Twins skipper Rocco Baldelli or World Series winning managers Davey Martinez (Nationals) and Joe Maddon (Cubs).
Many of these are following Tampa Bay’s postseason run with a little extra emotion.
“I know how important and how much time and effort they put into their culture. I'm proud to have had a very, very, very small part in helping to develop and maintain that culture,” Bendix, Marlins president of baseball operations since November 2023, said over the phone. “And it’s rewarding to see when that sort of thing leads to positive results, even though I am no longer rooting for those positive results myself.
“I want the Marlins to win,” Bendix, a Rays employee from 2009 to 2023, continued. “I don't want the Rays to win or the Brewers to win. But I want good things for my friends. It's heartwarming and makes me happy to see that happen.”
Nationals GM Ani Kilambi, who joined the Rays as an intern in 2015 while still a student at the University of California, expressed a similar sentiment.
“I have those close personal connections to the Rays people,” the 32-year-old said. “But with that being said, I’m rooting for the Nats, baby.”
Kilambi left Tampa after 2021 and spent four seasons with the Phillies before accepting Washington’s GM job last winter.
“Any time I’m watching the postseason, watching these games, I’m like, ‘god damn it, someone’s gonna win, and I’m not gonna be happy about it,’” he said. “If the Rays win, I’ll be happy for them on a personal level. [But] I would be really sad that I didn’t get to experience it with them. It’s very hard to disassociate the personal part with my own selfish motivations of just like, ‘Hey, I haven’t been at the top of the mountain.’”
Vogt, whose Guardians were eliminated by the Rays in the ALCS, began his big-league career in Tampa back in 2012. While his emotions were much clearer and his focus was entirely on winning that series with Cleveland, Vogt was still incredibly forthright about how important he considers his time with the Rays organization.
“This is where I grew up in the game,” he said before the ALCS. “And the reason I'm sitting here is a lot of the people that have worked here or still work here that poured into me, that saw value in me and who I was and helped develop me into the person and player that I am. It's going to be really fun to see a lot of those people over the next week. It's really special coming back here.”
Special is a word many of the former Rays use to describe their years with the club. They talk about their Tampa days with a halcyon lilt, the way someone might talk about a college friend group or old army buddies.
“I think we had a decent understanding that we were fortunate,” Bendix said. “And the longer I worked there, the more I grew to understand that was the case.”
Said Kilambi: “It was a really awesome environment for working together, challenging the status quo. We understood that there was a benefit to it being us against the world. ... And we were fortunate to have a lot of people who believed in that.”
Craig Albernaz, now the manager of the Orioles, referenced a unique culture of collaboration and genuine interpersonal connection in Tampa. From his tenure as a minor-league coach with the Rays, Albernaz recalled a time when then-GM Andrew Friedman was casually eating a meal in the Triple-A clubhouse while chopping it up with the players.
“Thinking back on that, the top guy is comfortable enough to sit there and be one of those guys and have those conversations without ever losing who he is, that he’s in charge,” Albernaz said. “Then he passed that baton to Erik Neander, who just took everything to the next level.”
Neander, who has run Tampa’s baseball ops department since 2017, is at the center of this story. Every single former employee who spoke to Yahoo Sports, when asked whom they thought about when catcher Liam Hicks caught the final out of the ALCS, mentioned Neander by name. His people skills, his vision and his willingness to push the envelope have helped sustain Tampa’s immensely impressive run of success, one initiated by Friedman. And Neander’s sustained presence, alongside manager Kevin Cash, has helped foster ideological continuity and cultural cohesion in both the front office and the dugout.
“Cash used to have people over at his house during spring training, cooking out, and everyone was invited,” Albernaz remembered. “Every different department would go, and it made everyone feel welcome — even us on the minor-league side.”
“Think about it this way,” Twins manager Derek Shelton, the hitting coach for the Rays from 2010 to 2016 and a longtime Tampa resident, said. “Longest tenured manager, pitching coach and hitting coach in baseball. That’s not easy to do.”
To be clear, none of these characters, these Rays-turned-something-else, are headed to Tropicana Field next week to wave towels or cheer their voices hoarse. They won’t be painting their faces or donning Rays caps. Their loyalties lie elsewhere now. Such is business, such is life.
But if the Rays outlast the Brewers to win the first World Series in franchise history, many around the industry will feel an undeniable little glimmer of pride.
“I felt good sitting there watching the game, you know,” said Butera, who said he gave away most, but not all, of his Rays gear.
The Nats skipper has a reason to be proud. His fingerprints are all over this American League champion. He managed an 18-year-old Junior Caminero in Low-A in 2022. First baseman Jonathan Aranda, then 20, played for a 25-year-old Butera in Hudson Valley in 2018. Late-inning reliever Ian Seymour and shortstop Taylor Walls remain close with Butera. Those relationships don’t evaporate just because a person switches organizations.
“I see Taylor [Walls] run out after they win, and you know, he's all fired up,” Butera said. “That makes you feel good. Like, that’s why we do what we do, right?”