The Washington Nationals are finalizing a deal to hire Blake Butera as manager and make him the youngest person to hold the job in the majors in more than half a century, sources told ESPN on Thursday.

At 33 years old, Butera will be the youngest manager since the Minnesota Twins hired Frank Quilici in 1972, according to ESPN Insights.

With their rebuild since a 2019 World Series win stalled, the Nationals fired general manager Mike Rizzo and manager Dave Martinez in July. Former Boston Red Sox assistant general manager Paul Toboni was hired in late September as president of baseball operations to replace Rizzo, and Washington’s search for a manager landed on an unlikely candidate in Butera.

Previously the senior player development director for the Tampa Bay Rays, Butera has managed four minor league seasons — the first at 25 years old — and compiled a 258-144 record with four first-place finishes. In his final two seasons with Low-A Charleston, Butera’s teams went 170-82 and won league championships.

Butera’s experience extends beyond the Rays, who drafted him in the 35th round in 2015 out of Boston College, where he played four years and served as team captain. He played two seasons in Tampa Bay’s minor league system before transitioning to coaching and spent a year as quality-control coach for Leones del Escogido in the Dominican Winter League as well as bench coach for Team Italy in the 2023 World Baseball Classic.

With fluency in advanced metrics and the detail-oriented approach that has made Rays employees coveted by other teams, Butera was regarded in the industry as a future manager. His combination of managerial and player-development experience appealed to the Nationals, whose hiring of Toboni, 35, gave them the youngest head of baseball operations as well.

Washington’s path back to relevancy in the loaded National League East is expected to take years. While the Nationals have a franchise-caliber player in outfielder James Wood, teams plan to inquire about their willingness to trade left-hander MacKenzie Gore, who is two years from reaching free agency, and shortstop CJ Abrams, who will hit the open market after the 2028 season.

The Nationals’ farm system was ranked 22nd in MLB by ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel following the selection of Oklahoma prep shortstop Eli Willits with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 draft. Washington’s top pitching prospect, Travis Sykora, underwent Tommy John surgery in July and is expected to miss most of the 2026 season.

With two on and two out in Game 5’s fourth inning, Tommy Edman took his best swing on a Trey Yesavage slider that stayed above the zone. Edman got just under it. The popup fell harmlessly into the glove of Toronto Blue Jays shortstop Andrés Giménez, halting an early threat against a budding ace who was just beginning to find his rhythm.

For weeks, the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ hitters had grown frustrated not just by an overall lack of production but by an inability to finish rallies. Edman’s popup was merely the latest example. The Dodgers did not place another runner in scoring position Wednesday night, continuing a prolonged trend that has their season on the brink and many of their hitters confused.

Said Mookie Betts: “We’ve got to figure something out.”

With the urgency rising and his patience lacking, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts made relatively drastic changes to his lineup ahead of Game 5. Will Smith became the first catcher in 90 years to hit in the No. 2 spot in a World Series game, sliding Betts down to bat third for the first time since 2021. Alex Call replaced the No. 9-hitting Andy Pages, who had managed just four hits in 50 at-bats in these playoffs.

The changes did not work. The Dodgers struck out 12 times and managed just three hits in seven innings against Yesavage, losing a critical game and forcing themselves to have to win on back-to-back nights in Toronto to secure a championship.

On Wednesday, Yesavage’s command was sharp, his slider was hellacious, but the Dodgers’ struggles extend way beyond him. Since cruising past the Cincinnati Reds in the wild-card round, their hitters are slashing a combined .214/.306/.360 in 13 playoff games, during which they’ve produced a .544 OPS with runners in scoring position. The Dodgers’ nine wins in that stretch are a testament to a starting rotation that is unfairly being asked to do it alone.

“It’s hard for a pitching staff to have to go every game uphill,” utility man Enrique Hernandez said. “We’re not really doing much as an offense. Whenever we get a chance, we don’t capitalize. We’re going through one of those funks right now; it’s just really bad timing to have those in the World Series.”

The Dodgers suffered through a similar low point at midseason. From July 4 to Aug. 13, when they went 12-21 and blew an eight-game division lead, they batted .235 and scored the majors’ sixth-fewest runs per game. Eventually, they got right. And though their regular season was generally underwhelming, the Dodgers approached October with the thought that their best baseball was ahead of them. It was a belief buoyed by their starting pitching, dominant enough to stifle any opposing lineup and deep enough to make up for most bullpen issues. But the offense was expected to perform.

It seemed like a given, until it wasn’t.

“We’ve got a lot of guys who aren’t hot right now,” Edman said, “aren’t feeling their best.”

It starts at the top.

In Game 5, the Nos. 1-4 hitters in the Dodgers’ lineup combined to go 1-for-15 with eight strikeouts. Shohei Ohtani has put together three masterful offensive performances — homering twice in the playoff opener, clinching a pennant with a three-homer game and reaching base nine times in the 18-inning marathon earlier this week — but he’s 6-for-48 in 12 other playoff games. Freeman is batting .235 over the last three rounds. Betts is 3-for-23 in the World Series.

“I’ve just been terrible,” Betts said. “I wish it were from lack of effort, but it’s not.”

And it’s not just the three future Hall of Famers. It’s Max Muncy (.188/.339/.354 postseason slash line). It’s Pages (.215 OPS, the lowest ever for a player with at least 50 plate appearances in a single playoff). It’s Enrique Hernández, one of history’s most illustrious October performers (.844 career postseason OPS, but 4-for-26 over his past seven games).

In 123 innings since the wild-card round, the Dodgers have scored three or more runs just three times. And though hitting is significantly more difficult this time of year, their opponent is providing a snapshot of what is possible.

The Blue Jays have outscored the Dodgers by 11 runs in this series and by a whopping 36 runs in these playoffs, even though they’ve played just one more game.

“It doesn’t feel great,” Roberts said. “You clearly see those guys finding ways to get hits, move the baseball forward, and we’re not doing a good job of it.”

After a night in which the Dodgers got a solo home run and nothing else, ultimately taking just one at-bat with a runner in scoring position, Roberts stressed to his team the importance of adjusting — of shortening up, hitting the ball the other way, working deep counts and getting the opposing bullpen more heavily involved.

“We gotta hit the ball,” Muncy said. “You look at what they’re doing, they put the ball in play a lot, and it’s finding spots. We’re not putting the ball in play a lot, and when we do, it seems to be finding the glove.”

The Dodgers are striking out at a 25.3% rate in this series, a little more than three percentage points higher than they did during the regular season. Their chase rate is 28.6%, compared to 25.9% from March to September. It’s an uptick, but not a seismic one, especially when you layer in the added difficulty of facing so many high-leverage arms in October. The biggest problem, some of their players believe, is they’re caught in between — passive at the wrong time, too aggressive on pitches they can’t slug and generally not diligent enough with their approach.

“We just have to have a better selection of pitches that we want to swing at,” Dodgers outfielder Teoscar Hernández said. “We just have to get a better plan, not trying to do too much with the pitches that they throw. Every pitcher in the playoffs, he can make the best pitches and the best location that he can make, and we have to adjust to that and just try to do damage on the ones we can handle.”

Late Wednesday night, as players gathered their belongings and prepared to board another cross-country flight to Toronto, many of them found hope in the rejuvenation of an off day. They know Rogers Centre will be rocking on Friday night, eager to celebrate the Blue Jays’ first championship in 32 years, but they took solace in whom they had to counter it — Yoshinobu Yamamoto, fresh off another nine-inning mastery.

They also know he can’t do it alone.

“We’ve got a lot of confidence in him, but we’ve got to hit,” Betts said. “Yoshi is going to do his thing. We need him to, obviously. But we’ve got to hit. There’s no way around that.”

NASHVILLE — Earlier this summer, Australian Football League coach Damien Hardwick stumbled across the Netflix series, “Any Given Saturday,” which followed SEC teams throughout the 2024 season.

Hardwick, coach of the Gold Coast Suns in Queensland, was fascinated while watching the third episode, “Shock the World,” which documented Vanderbilt‘s 40-35 upset of then-No. 1 Alabama on Oct. 5, 2024.

It was the Commodores’ first victory over a No. 1-ranked team and their first over the Crimson Tide in 40 years.

Led by an undersized, fiery quarterback and a coaching staff convinced it could take on the world, Vanderbilt flipped the script from being the SEC’s perennial punching bag to world beaters.

“The club I’m at now is very, very similar,” Hardwick said. “A bit of a laughingstock, a bit of a joke. People used to come to our place for a holiday.”

The Gold Coast Suns, an expansion team that joined the AFL in 2009, had never captured a final series berth in their 16-year history until this past season. Hardwick was so impressed by Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea and the culture he built that he and four of his assistants took a 22-hour flight to the United States and spent two days with the Commodores this week.

“He’s a connector,” Hardwick said of Lea. “We were fortunate enough to sit in his meeting, and I felt like running through a brick wall for him with the way he goes about it. He’s just a very smart operator. The way he gets his people to do great things is what makes a great coach, and that’s the reason I think they’re having success.”

Lea and quarterback Diego Pavia are two big reasons for Vanderbilt’s success, but they aren’t the only people behind its sudden transformation from SEC also-ran to legitimate College Football Playoff contender.

Heading into Saturday’s game at No. 20 Texas (noon ET, ABC), the Commodores are 7-1 for the first time since 1941 and No. 9 in the AP poll, their highest ranking since they were seventh for one week in 1937.

According to Lea, chancellor Daniel Diermeier and athletic director Candice Storey Lee deserve just as much credit as the players and coaches for providing the financial resources and other support that previously wasn’t there for the football team at one of the country’s most highly regarded academic institutions.

“Vanderbilt’s never cared about this program,” said Lea, a Vanderbilt fullback from 2002 to 2004. “Well, I shouldn’t say never because of some of the records that we’re breaking right now, so maybe back in the 1940s or whatever. But there’s never been a time where it was like, ‘Hey, we’re going to be really good at this, and we’re going to do the things we need.’

“In fact, if anything, I think there’s been almost a resistance to that for fear that it cuts against a narrative that we’re an elite academic institution. What our chancellor understands now is that this is the front porch.”

Diermeier, who was named Vanderbilt’s ninth chancellor in July 2020, is a most unlikely college football fan. He grew up in West Berlin, Germany, during the Cold War. He was a sports fan as a child, watching Olympic wrestling and World Cup soccer on TV. He was the first person in his family to attend college and went to USC as an international student in 1988.

Diermeier spoke fairly fluent English but didn’t know much about the sports metaphors that are a part of American vernacular. Someone in the USC language lab suggested he watch sports on TV to learn about phrases such as “got the ball across the goal line” and “hit a home run.”

Diermeier wasn’t familiar with baseball or American football but decided to follow the sports anyway. The first baseball game he watched was Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, in which Dodgers pinch-hitter Kirk Gibson smacked a walk-off, two-run homer against A’s closer Dennis Eckersley and famously hobbled around the bases in the ninth inning of a 5-4 victory.

That same year, No. 2 USC, led by star quarterback Rodney Peete, defeated No. 6 UCLA 31-22 in the Rose Bowl to improve to 10-0. USC lost to No. 1 Notre Dame 27-10 in its regular-season finale, knocking it out of the national championship hunt.

“The whole campus was crazy,” Diermeier recalled. “There was Rodney Peete versus [UCLA quarterback] Troy Aikman. It was fantastic, and I just loved it. I saw what college athletics can do for a community. It was a very powerful experience.”

After earning a PhD in political science at the University of Rochester, Diermeier’s academic career ascended from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business to Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management to the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, where he also served as provost.

The football programs at Stanford and Northwestern were similar to Vanderbilt’s — they were trying to be competitive at high-academic institutions. They enjoyed stretches of being good but largely have struggled.

“People told me, ‘Yeah, you have seen the Big Ten and you have seen the Pac-12, [but] you have not seen the SEC and that’s a different game,'” Diermeier said. “They were right, and so it became very quickly clear that this is a different level of intensity, a different level of passion, and that we had not performed on that level.”

The Commodores went 0-9 in Diermeier’s first season on campus during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Vanderbilt fired coach Derek Mason, whose teams went 27-55 in seven seasons, and replaced him with Lea, who had been Notre Dame‘s defensive coordinator for three seasons.

It wasn’t like the Commodores had never won in the 21st century. Lea’s coach at Vanderbilt, Bobby Johnson, had some success, guiding the Commodores to a 7-6 record and bowl victory in 2008. James Franklin pulled off what had seemed impossible, directing Vandy to back-to-back 9-4 campaigns in 2012 and 2013.

But a criminal case involving four football players accused of raping and sodomizing an unconscious 21-year-old female student in a dorm room hung a dark cloud over the program. Three of the four players were convicted; the fourth reached a plea deal with prosecutors.

“Unfortunately, [Franklin] left in a manner that wasn’t great [because] you had this rape trial that really was a black eye for the program,” Lea said. “And so that stretch of success was kind of almost wiped away.”

Lea didn’t have immediate success at his alma mater. The Commodores went 2-10 in 2021 and improved to 5-7 the next season. After going 2-10 again in 2023, Lea knew things had to change dramatically if Vanderbilt was ever going to be good.

After losing All-SEC offensive tackle Tyler Steen to Alabama following the 2021 season and 1,000-yard rusher Ray Davis to Kentucky the next season, Lea realized the Commodores couldn’t be competitive in the SEC unless they took more seasoned players from the transfer portal and became more competitive in name, image and likeness payouts.

After going 9-27 in his first three seasons, Lea told his athletic director that if the school couldn’t find $3 million in donations before the transfer portal opened in December 2023, Vanderbilt wouldn’t have a program.

Lee secured $6 million in NIL contributions in one week, according to Lea.

“She knew what was going on here,” Lea said. “We’ve never been disorganized. It’s always been purposeful and intentional. But it’s so easy when things don’t go well to blame the team. It’s so easy when things don’t go well to blame the coach. She was such a partner and wanted to solve the problem. In that one week, she never flinched.”

That money helped the Commodores land New Mexico State transfers Pavia and star tight end Eli Stowers after Lea hired then-Aggies coach Jerry Kill as his chief consultant and senior offensive advisor. Lea also brought in New Mexico State offensive coordinator Tim Beck and three other assistants to help turn things around.

When Vanderbilt general manager Barton Simmons talked to Pavia for the first time, the former junior college quarterback who didn’t have a single FBS or FCS scholarship offer coming out of high school, told him: “Just tell Coach Lea if he brings me here, we’re gonna win every f—ing game we play.”

“It didn’t feel like bulls—, and it felt authentic,” Simmons said. “He wasn’t saying it in an impulsive way. It was almost like he was expressing his belief.”

The Commodores haven’t won every game with Pavia under center, but they’ve won more than most people would have believed. He’s among the Heisman Trophy favorites after passing for 1,698 yards with 15 touchdowns and leading the team in rushing with 458 yards and five scores.

Lea said Pavia has brought much more to the Commodores than his production.

“There’s only so much I can do as head coach to establish leadership in the program,” Lea said. “What I’ve learned through Diego is, first of all, there’s no one more important on the team than the quarterback. And second, you can’t manufacture alpha leadership, but once you have an alpha leader, that attitude can spread throughout.”

Simmons, a former recruiting analyst for Rivals.com and 247Sports, was one of Lea’s football teammates at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville. They won two state titles together. Simmons was a defensive back at Yale, while Lea went to play baseball at Birmingham Southern before transferring to Vanderbilt.

Simmons was among Lea’s first hires, putting him in charge of personnel and roster development, while assisting in recruiting and scouting.

A former SEC defensive coordinator told ESPN that the Commodores have done a remarkable job of evaluating transfers, especially in the trenches. All five of their starting offensive linemen are graduate transfers or seniors from other schools. The top three reserves also are transfers.

The Vanderbilt coaching staff’s message to potential recruits and transfers is clear: “If you’re coming here, this is going to be really, really hard because you’re playing in the best conference in college football,” Simmons said. “We’re going to hold you to the highest standards in college football. And you’re going to have to go to class during the week next to some of the smartest people in the world.”

While Diermeier has helped by securing athletes priority registration for classes to keep practice times open and creating more slots for graduate transfers, Vanderbilt’s academic requirements and expectations haven’t wavered.

“We say, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that we compete with Harvard Monday to Friday and with Alabama on Saturday,” Diermeier said.

Lee wasn’t done in getting her football coach what he needed, either. The ongoing Vandy United campaign has raised more than $350 million to improve athletics facilities and the student-athlete experience.

The new south end at FirstBank Stadium includes a multiuse, 130,000 square foot facility with a new football locker room, premium seating, dining facility and renovated concourse.

A previously completed north end zone project included a new videoboard, premium seating and a basketball practice facility.

Lea hopes the football investments aren’t over. He wants a stand-alone football operations building and indoor practice facility. Lea said the current weight room doesn’t allow his entire team to work out together.

The university provided $100 million to the campaign fund to get it off the ground.

“It’s essential to have alignment from the very top,” Lee said. “So in order for me to execute the vision, I do have to have support and someone in our chancellor who wants to be bold, who’s not beholden to the past, who doesn’t care about what the history was. [Diermeier] said from the very beginning that there would be no daylight between us, and he would support the vision that I had.”

With the changing landscape in college athletics, Lee realized Vanderbilt was in danger of being left behind if hefty investments weren’t made.

“The past has kind of always hung over us,” Lee said. “We’ve had these moments of success, but they’ve been fleeting. We don’t want to just experience success in a moment, right? We want to be able to sustain excellence, and that’s what this university expects across the board.”

Diermeier, a former business school professor, put it another way, comparing the rapidly evolving world of college sports to the deregulation of U.S. airlines in 1978.

“I want to be Southwest,” he said. “I don’t want to be Pan Am.”

Lee has deep roots at Vanderbilt. She was a captain of the women’s basketball team in 2002 and earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees there. She became the school’s first female athletic director and the first Black woman to lead an SEC athletic department in 2020.

While some have suggested that she and Lea have grand visions for Vanderbilt football only because they went to school there, she says that’s not the case.

“I mean, we are both alums and so we care deeply for this place, but it’s not just that,” she said. “It’s not just an emotional connection, and we do have that, but it is also because we are fierce competitors that deeply believe that this can become something great.”

While Lea once feared NIL and the transfer portal would leave the Commodores behind, he now calls their presence the great disruptor. It has leveled the playing field for schools like Vanderbilt, Indiana and Georgia Tech, if the right financial resources are in place.

“We’ve become a really attractive place because this is also different,” Lea said. “People are inspired by the idea of building something and not inheriting something.”